It’s time for the Bike News Roundup! As always, this is an open thread.
First up, here’s how you can turn a couple parking lots into a boom for your business:
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Pacific Northwest News
- The Fight Against Small Apartments by Dominic Holden – The Stranger
- Where Are My Cars: SR-167 HOT Lanes | Sightline Daily – WSDOT has a serious traffic growth prediction problem.
- City librarians to bring services to popular community events by bike this summer « Cascade Bike Blog
- Trikes race down Queen Anne Hill for beer | Picture This | The Seattle Times
- Community celebrates completion of 33rd Avenue pedestrian improvements | Lake City Live
- Cyclists Aren’t the Ones “Digging In Their Heels” On Burke-Gilman Trail | Seattle Met
- Man trying to help drunk cyclist ends up getting him arrested | KOMO News
- Woman dies following collision with stolen pickup in Everett | Seattle Times
- Seattle man dribbling soccer ball to Brazil killed in Oregon | Seattle Times
- State Senate panel OK’s changes to DUI laws | Seattle Times
- Driver cited for DUI in collision that left Zipcar upside down on E Madison | CHS Capitol Hill Seattle
- Commute Challenge sponsor Adobe achieves BizCycle Gold « Cascade Bike Blog
- Commute Challenge Lessons Learned: Part 1 | Bicycle Alliance of Washington
- “Linking cycling and transportation, you can get most anywhere.” « Cascade Bike Blog
Halftime show! Denver has come a long, long way since 1976. For example, the photo below shows an epic parking crater…
…but today that area has a bustling pedestrian-only street that looks like this (video is shot from that tower you see in the photo. The black building next to the tower is the one on the left side of the frame):
National & Global News
- Cyclists Are Special, and They Should Have Their Own Rules | Streetsblog.net
- ‘Cycle tweet’ girl breaks her silence | Anglia – ITV News – Hit and run is a despicable crime. Bragging about it on Twitter afterwards? Yikes.
- The Granddaddy of Sprawl Subsidies, Illustrated | Streetsblog.net
- HelmetHub: Bicycle Helmet Vending Machines Rolling Out in Boston
- Women Lead the Way For Future Growth of Cycling in North America – Momentum Mag
- BikePortland.org » You’re not as visible on a bike at night as you think, new study shows
- BikePortland.org » Urban Cycling Hall of Fame will put spotlight on ‘urban bike movement’
- Next Boondoggle From Wisconsin DOT: Double-Decking Milwaukee Freeway | Streetsblog.net – Seriously?
- The Inequitable Toll of Pedestrian Deaths | Streetsblog Capitol Hill
- Bike Trains are the Lightest Rail | LADOT Bike Blog
Comments
6 responses to “Bike News Roundup: How to turn a couple parking spots into a boon for your business”
Comparing that Denver pic to today (at least today from Google maps): http://i.imgur.com/dqfx5qY.jpg
Maybe in 10 years we’ll be able to make a similar sort of comparison image of the Denny Triangle.
On second thought, maybe 20 — Amazon is going to build over some of that parking, but not all.
What’s unseen, of course, is that a lot of the buildings we build over that surface parking will have more parking than the lots they replace, both underground and above. Surely the same is true in Denver, given the vintage of the construction.
Well Amazon does have 200+ riders registered in the commute challenge. I think that there are a lot more people who ride sometimes but aren’t motivated to sign up for these sort of things. The company supports bicyclists and transit users, but it also subsidizes driving by paying part of the monthly parking costs. It’s sort of agnostic about it, which matches it’s founders libertarian view of the world.
Ha, a true market-oriented solution would be to let users pay their full travel and parking costs, regardless of mode. I actually support this approach generally (though it obviously doesn’t work in places where government regulation mandates a massive excess of parking, making it worthless… like Austrian inflation theory applied to parking). Build the buildings with some parking and charge employees what the market will bear, along with the anyone else that cares to park there. Providing partially subsidized parking is much closer to that than many employers, of course, which fully subsidize employee parking.
It’s also a benefits on the cheap plan. There are tax breaks for providing transit subsidies. And if you get like 100% participation on those ORCA cards, you can get them for a huge discount over the regular retail price. (probably a minimum number required as well.) And I suspect that the parking subsidy is also a tax write off.
Still they have one of the better bicycle commuter support systems around with the secure cages, locker rooms, towel service etc.