There’s been a lot of pushback recently on the bike-share plan in New York City and one of the more insidious efforts of the bike-share program has involved the fact that the bicycles are now being stored at curbside in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg.
The idea of installing racks at curbside is a good one, in that it encourages people to ride bikes, which gets people out of their cars. But the backlash against the bikes being stored at curbside has basically boiled down to an anger over the fumes that are now wafting out into the neighborhood from the bikes. The bikes, then, are (kind of) no different than the trash cans that are used for your recycling: You can’t go around throwing them in.
One option would be to set up new bike racks somewhere near curbside. Most of the bikes will only need a simple pedal press to unlock and start, and your distance from the nearest station on a bike share will dictate how far away you can hang on, but, given how easy it is to avoid bike shares, you’d at least have more of a leg up if you were staying at your desk. I’m all for having curbside storage, but to pay for a bicycle rack is to punish people for trying to use a bike-share service.
The other option for improving bike-share parking — and people’s feelings about the shared bikes that their kids have grown up riding — is to put them on tracks, where the pedaling doesn’t interrupt the flow of traffic. For now, that would mean a lot of work to make the tracks a reality. But, well, it would have to be done.
Read the full story at New York Magazine.
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