Bike Racks: On MetroBus, Lack of in Places and Wrong Type in Others
I can only recall taking a city bus once in my lifetime, a few years ago to get to MetroLink to get me to the airport for a flight out of St. Louis. Thirty-eight years and I’ve ridden a bus once. Sad really when you think about it.
So today I did something really big. Not only did I take the bus downtown but I took my bike along for the ride. I made use of the fold-down bike racks on the front the bus to quickly get me from South St. Louis to downtown. From 4th & Washington, where I got off the bus, I was able to bike around downtown and to my meeting at the St. Louis AIA office. [UPDATE 4/19 9:20am – The bike rack on the front of the bus was very easy to use! I highly recommend to others to give it a try.]
Before the meeting I stopped at 10th Street Italian to have dinner. Great food, low prices and alfresco dining are a winning combination. As no bike racks are provided on 10th Street I had to secure my bike to a parking meter.
Locking to a meter is not idea. First, it creates a obstacle for those trying to add money to their meter. Second, it simply is not a secure as a bike rack or even a street sign. My bike weighs a whopping 50lbs so it would take a strong and determined person to lift it over the meter to steal it.
At left is my bike secured to one of the new stylish bike racks located on Washington Avenue East of Tucker. The placement of the smaller ring on the rack made it very easy to secure both my frame & front wheel to the rack – a very good thing. However, the design of the rack and its placement on the sidewalk put my front wheel in the path of pedestrians.
I’m sorry, this is bad planning. I can see what they did. Someone decided they wanted concrete to indicate where people should walk and then they have a section for decorative brick for the other stuff like street trees (good) and benches (not used). The bike rack placement is seemingly based solely on the fact they need to bolt to the concrete. This is not how a very functional item should be located.
The basic inverted U rack on Washington Avenue West of Tucker is the type I’d like to see all over St. Louis. This holds two bikes, like these, but it turns the bikes to be parallel with the street and sidewalk. This keeps the pedestrian path clear.
In the above picture I was locked to the ring away from the bench. Upon returning to the AIA office later I switched to the other position on the rack – nearest the park bench. Since the bench and other rack position was empty is wasn’t a big deal to get my bike in and out of this position. However, had another bike been locked to the rack it would have been a challenge to get my bike into place and secured to the rack.
I’ve got a theory about the placement of the bike racks so close to the back of the benches. Since they had to place the racks in the concrete walkway it was thought they should be near the benches so someone doesn’t accidently run into them.
This rack also places both bikes in the same direction. This is also a problem as handlebars often conflict if bikes go in the same direction. Using racks that allow the bikes to alternate direction are much better in sidewalk situations.
In summary, decorative brick where it is hard to secure a bike rack led to the wrong rack in the wrong place. The bike racks are close to the benches so they are not a trip hazard but if the rack gets used the front wheel becomes a hazard to pedestrians. We just finished this project so we will likely have to live with it for sometime.
The worst part is this was “professionally” planned. Someone made the decisions that let to a less than ideal situation. This is a case where I think the ideal, or at least closer to it, could have easily been achieved within the given time and budget. Aesthetic decisions were made over functional considerations. This was done either by choice or lack of understanding about the implications.
When we spend our tax dollars and build brand new projects we should be getting better design – not just pretty patterns in the paving.
– Steve
What about turning your bike 90 degrees and locking it that way? Whould that work? And if not I wonder if the racks themselves could be turned 90 degrees and then reattached.
You make a great point about how tricky good design is. It cant just look good on paper.
In your case, you could really only position your bike in those two directions because of the U-lock that you are using. If you use a cable or chain lock, the bike can be positioned parallel to the street without a problem.
[This is a response to both this comment and the one above. Yes, using a cable lock I could have secured the bike parallel with the street & sidewalk. In fact, I had a cable lock with me. But I prefer using my updated U-lock.
The real point is I was using a brand new bike rack in the manner intended by the manufacturer of the rack and of the designer that specified this rack for this particular installation. It doesn’t work well. Can I improvise, sure. After spending $2.5 million of our money should we be expected to compromise on such a simple issue?
This is not about making due with something because we don’t have the funds to make change. That I can completely accept and I carry a cable lock for that reason. What I can’t accept is a brand new streetscape that doesn’t work as intended. We should demand a refund from someone.
Next time I am there with my bike I will lock it in a different way to see how that works. My initial thought is that it will prevent two bikes from using the rack. – Steve]
Turning those Washington-east-of-Tucker racks 90 degrees while leaving them in exactly the same place would solve the obstacle-to-pedestrians problem.
One of the bikes locked to the rack would get in the way of people on the bench, but this isn’t much of a problem since nobody is ever going to voluntarily sit there anyway, with traffic whizzing past a few inches away.
The tree grate is also perfectly placed to interfere with and/or chew up kickstands.
As well, it appears from the photos that if the rack was closer to the curb, the rear wheel would pretty darn close to the traffic lane.
The difficult-to-use bike rack.
The seating no sane person would ever sit upon.
The hazardous-to-kickstands tree grate.
So much, so wrong, in such a small space. Illustrating perfectly what happens when what’s fashionable in planning and design circles–or used to be fashionable, or soon may become fashionable–gets shmeared thoughtlessly onto a site and called ‘amenities’ or ‘site improvements’ or ‘pedestrian-friendly design’ and never thereafter given so much as a backward glance by the professionals doing the improving.
Did they work as envisioned?
That is, do people actually use them?
Do they achieve what they were meant to?
Or are the bike rack, bench and tree gate just symbols? Bits of evidence scattered about? Material proof that St. Louis does too know about urbanism? So there.
This is almost as bad as something we might do in New York.
Maybe they need to make cast iron plaques with diagrams that accompany these that are set in the concrete since we obviously don’t get how to use them properly. Or with the budget available maybe just spray paint some plan views of bikes as they are to be aligned with the pole. Nice- real nice.
I would like to remind a few particular people of what Washington Street used to look like. I have been working in and around the area for about the past 15 years now. I remember how the building rubble was all over the sidewalks and the sidewalks were uneven and broken. Mostly vacant buildings. No such thing as a bench to sit on, much less a place to lock your bike. You were constantly besieged by vagrants plying for money.
Broken glass that littered the road and the side walk made it mostly perilous to travel by any wheeled vehicle. Trees? Not a chance. Flower pots, no way. Trash cans? are you kidding me? The sidewalk and road were filled with litter. The stoplights were falling down. Whine if it makes you feel better, but hopefully people that are planning on visiting this area aren’t as disturbed by your opinions as they would have been had Washington Street been left the way it was. BTW – did it ever occur to you that they used a bike rack that is versitile enough to be used by all the locks available.
I personally know that the designers for this project worked diligently from all angles, for a very long time, verified all products with the available subsurfaces that they had to work with, and checked out the best solutions with what was available. A huge number of people were involved in these decisions, not just one designer.
Are you even aware of the vaults and tunnels below the surface of the road that they were dealing with? I guess being a couch designer is always the best way to point out someone elses faults, as long as you get them straight. Hey, maybe its another couch designer like you that continues to rip out the plantings and tear up the trees… Some people are just never happy.