Secure Bike Parking Just Cents Per Hour

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Clarence Eckerson Jr.: [00:08] Safe convenient bike parking in New York City is practically non existent. And although the city has installed thousands of on-street racks in the last five years, it still leaves a lot to be desired. And nowhere is that more evident than in places like this. We’re here in the East Village, near the 2^nd Avenue stop on the F-Line, and anytime you come here you could see dozens of bicycles just locked up to anything that doesn’t move, fences, signposts and the few on-street bike parking racks that they do have. If you come over here, of course one of the big problems is is your bike even going to be here when you get back, or at least the way you left it? And you can see here this is missing handlebars, a wheel, seat post. Well it doesn’t have to be this way. New York City could do a lot better. Last week I was out in the San Francisco Bay area where I visited a BikeLink bike parking facility. And there you can actually park your bike for pennies per hour safely and know that your bike is going to be there when you get back. If this sounds like a dream, take a look, it’s not.

Gustavo Huber: [01:11] So we’re here at the El Cerrito Plaza bike station and we have 48 eLockers available for use that have been installed here since 2004. And they’re available for use for any BikeLink member. The City of El Cerrito purchased the eLockers to be put here in conjunction with bike racks, traditional lockers, the BART station and Ohlone Greenway, which runs right here in proximity to the Bay Trail and a number of other sort of bicycle arteries. It’s really like a key transportation node for people on bicycles and on foot, catching buses, catching taxis, taking BART. The eLockers are just electronic on demand lockers that are meant to replace and add to bike parking solutions at internodal stations, at any place that you might want to ride to. With the traditional assigned locker, you might have five lockers and that means you can serve at most five people. But in reality you maybe have one hardcore user and then the rest of them are vacant most of the time or in long term storage. And you have a waiting list of at least twice as many people. You may have five/ten people on a waiting list. With the eLockers, each locker that’s not currently in use is available for another user to use. You might have one hardcore person that’s using the same eLocker every day, and the rest of them might rotate people. So the same eLocker throughout a year might serve five to seven different people, or more, depending on how many are visiting the site. You can go to any BikeLink vendor, like the snack bar that’s over there who sells cards and you can pay cash, or you can go to bikelink.org where you get a small perk for signing up online. You register some basic information so that we can contact you and you’re mailed a card or handed a card on the spot, you sign a User Agreement and then it’s yours to use as a debit account, just like a parking card. When you go to a locker, you put a certain amount of time on and you prepay that amount. When you come back to check out your bike, any difference in time is either refunded onto your card or deducted off again. So if you stayed an extra hour, maybe an extra dime is taken from your card. If you stayed less than you thought, those extra four cents per hour are put back on. You take your prepaid BikeLink card, you show up at the locker and so long as it’s available like this one is, you insert your card, it says Welcome to BikeLink, and then you start to add time, just like adding quarters into a parking metre. Press the button and the door is unlocked. Put your bike inside. Close the door. Remove your card and it’ll remind you how long you have. And it’ll count down time until the rental is expired. You come back, you have your BikeLink card. Now your card won’t unlock any space except the one that it started renting. You show up. You put your card in. It’ll say Welcome Back, and then you press the button to end the rental. Press the button, the door’s now unlocked. And then you can remove your card, take your bike, close the door, and it’s ready for someone else to rent. And in the meantime it remains locked so people can’t put debris in it. In Oakland we have a slightly different system. A little bit newer. It has one controller for every two locker doors. And that way that we keep our prices a little bit lower for the cities that want to purchase eLockers. One of the central ideas of the eLockers is that they’re available for everyday commuters and they’re available for people that are just out and about touring.

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Clarence Eckerson Jr.: [04:35] So here I am in Downtown Oakland. Rode my bike down here and decided to take Gus up on his offer to check out the BikeLink bike parking that exists on 14^th Street and Broadway. Gus gave me a card, a BikeLink card, to use and came down here, found the lockers, found an open spot, put the card in, put my bike in there about 15 seconds later, walked away. And I got to say it’s the first time I’ve ever been anywhere where I’m not worrying about my bicycle. You know I know it’s locked up in a very secure place right now, that nobody can get to it. You know I’m not worrying about being close to where the bike is locked up to, or worried about it not being there, because I know it’s going to be there. I wish New York had something like this, if we have lockers like on every corner, it would be pretty freaking amazing. You know, so I went out, got myself a slice of pizza, I’m eating it here in this wonderful park, and I know that, you know, my bike is a couple of blocks away and it’s going to be just fine.

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