Turns out, parking on the Hill is hard to find whether you drive a car or ride a bicycle.
Commute Seattle released a study recently that analyzed the state of privately-provided bike parking available to people commuting to the city’s center. The result shows that Capitol Hill’s city center non-residential buildings have the fewest number of privately-provided bike parking spaces of all other city center neighborhoods, and that the spaces available are of a disproportionately poor quality.
Basically, if you can’t find a city-installed rack, your options are limited:
DIY bike rack on Pine.
The study only looked at Capitol Hill south of Mercer and west of Broadway as part of its city center study. Only non-residential buildings that can accommodate commuter bicycle parking were counted, of which there are 104 on the Hill. Of those 104, only four provided a bike rack. At less than four percent of buildings, the Hill’s rate is far lower than any other city center neighborhood.
The study found only 110 privately-owned bike parking spaces in the neighborhood. However, the Hill also has a lower-than-average stock of bike parking that is safe from theft, weather and damage. Less than ten percent of the parking spaces are of “preferred” quality, a rate far lower than the other neighborhoods studied. That means the study found only 22 high quality, privately-provided spaces in the whole neighborhood.
The city’s building codes require bike parking, but only buildings constructed or renovated since 2006 would have fallen under this code. This has created a gap in bike parking amenities between new and old buildings throughout the city.
Property and business owners should not expect the city to help out the bike parking situation any time soon, though. SDOT has put the Bike Spot program — which installs both sidewalk bike racks and on-street bike parking corrals — on hold and has offered the program up for budget cuts (see my coverage at Seattle Bike Blog).
“We don’t know yet whether the cut will be accepted at the citywide level, but until we have certainty, we are not proceeding with any further bicycle rack work,” said Sam Woods from SDOT. “We understand that this may be disappointing, but it was one of many painful cuts SDOT was forced to offer.”
The full Commute Seattle report is below:
Speaking of bike racks, does this include removing some that are already installed? The rack in front of top pot/Toscana has gone missing at least as of yesterday morning.
at Pacific Place yesterday on Pine Street in the middle of the afternoon, a friend emerged from SIFF to discover missing seat and saddlebag. saw saddlebag on passing bike and gave chase weaving through downtown traffic. stopped cyclist, identified saddlebag, seat and lights were inside. cyclist at that point helped remove the saddlebag. both items were tied to my friend’s bike as minimal security. All’s well that ends well.
It’s those damn horse tie-ups that ruin bike parking, imo. They take up sidewalk space and budget that should be spent on bike spots. Is it even legal to ride a horse in Seattle?
“All’s well that ends well.”
Except the guy suffered basically no repercussions and will undoubtedly do it again. Please tell me he at least got a punch in the face?
Whatever happened to just locking your huffy wherever it fit? Tree, meter, no parking sign? WTF? Bikers are a bunch of entitled little babies.