Plan Now for Spring Biking Convenience

If you don’t ride a bike, you might think this is a trivial issue, but it is critical to making cycling a viable mode of transportation in an urban area. When you want to go into a store or lock your bike for some other reason, sturdy, permanent objects you can lock up to are scarce in the concrete jungle.

The City gets points for leaving old parking meters in place in some busy areas, with signs explaining they don’t work as parking meters anymore, but they are for bicyclists (check the corner of Roosevelt and Wabash by the Jewel, for example).

Tracy Schwarz has a great short piece in The RedEye about the inequality of distribution of city services expressed in terms of access to bike racks. However, this might be your fault, or your neighbor’s, not the fault of anyone downtown. Bike rack installations are triggered by citizen calls to the general purpose city services number, 311. So if there are more in some neighborhoods than others, bicyclists need to get on phone to City Hall. Schwarz notes that,

West Town, which includes Wicker Park, Noble Square and  Ukrainian Village, is the friendliest community area for cyclists. West Town has 306 bike rack locations, not including racks at public transportation stations, according to the Chicago Department of Transportation.

But if you’re on the South Side, specifically in Riverdale, Burnside or Oakland, you may be forced to lock your ride to a street sign. Those locations have the fewest bike racks, CDOT data shows.

If you are a rider who lives outside of West Town, you can get on the phone and register your request at 311. West Towners can call, too, but in the interest of fairness, and fostering cycling as a viable alternative to driving around the city, it will serve the public domain to spread the bike racks around wherever they are needed. There is hope, continues Schwarz,

In the next few years, the city plans to augment bike parking, specifically in office buildings, universities, hospitals and retail centers, under Mayor Daley’s Bike 2015 plan, which seeks to increase bicycle use among city residents so that 5 percent of all trips less than five miles are by bicycle.

This is from the City of Chicago Department of Transportation‘s Bicycle Program about how to get a bike rack near your favorite hang-out, or to locate one before you travel to mass transit:

Steve Vance has this fantastic image and a brief note about his work behind the scenes with the data that goes into an excellent infographic like this (from the RedEye) on his Flickr.com site. This is a concrete example of how opening up data can serve the public on many levels and make government officials and workers feel good about their works, because they can document how they are serving the needs of those they represent.