@jrenaut 131042 wrote:
Hopefully Arlington does it better than DC would. Here, we pass laws not to cover bike parking, but to cover someone having to write regulations to cover bike parking. Then no one writes regulations for a few years. Then they finally do, and they’re not completely terrible, but no one enforces them. Muriel Bowser gives a press conference about how great she is, and everything remains exactly the same.
At least in central DC, the various BIDs have picked up a lot of the slack. The Downtown DC BID issued a press release just yesterday announcing the completion of their three-year plan to nearly double the amount of bike parking spaces in the BID’s coverage area (basically everything south of Massachusetts Ave. between 1st St and 16th St NW, to Constitution Ave, minus some small sections controlled by the federal gov’t).
http://www.downtowndc.org/press-releases/press-release-downtowndc-bid-completes-three-year-plan-nearly-double-bike-parking
There is now near-saturation coverage of bike parking in that very busy area. They went from 531 racks in 2012 to 964 today. Except for the blocks with older large federal buildings and a couple blocks on the east end of the area, nearly every single block of every street has bike racks. (The newer Reagan Building has many bike racks though.) Blocks in the busiest corridors have several racks per block. Many of the private parking garages also have bike racks, although it’s not always easy to verify which garages have racks unless you work in the building.
The Golden Triangle BID has also been busy with a bike rack program of its own. I’ve spotted more new bike racks there on multiple occasions, even though that area also has near-saturation coverage of bike racks. They cover much of the area around Farragut Square and Connecticut Ave. south of Dupont Circle.
Lower Georgetown (M St to the waterfront) has bike racks on most blocks now, something I wasn’t expecting to see until I checked it out.
The Capitol Riverfront BID (near the Navy Yard and Nationals Park) has also helped to add many new bike racks in their coverage area. Nationals Park is ringed by bike racks, plus they have the Bike Valet on game days.
Some of the more residential neighborhoods outside of the central core do not have many bike racks at all, although some of the local commercial corridors do have bike racks. But there isn’t as much of a need for bike racks in purely residential areas.
At least in DC, bike rack programs seem to be tied to the local BIDs or CID (Community Improvement District). The larger BIDs have been very active in adding bike racks to busy commercial/retail/dining areas over the past couple years. While more work needs to be done in neighborhoods without large BIDs/CIDs, at least many of the prime activity areas in DC now have near-saturation coverage of bike racks. I do think it would be useful for DC to require bike shower facilities to be added to new large buildings, if they don’t already. This would be a very big deal, considering that there are over 100 ongoing medium to large to super-large construction projects in progress in DC right now, with many more in the planning stages. I don’t know about every construction project, but I know that the developers of The Wharf at the Southwest Waterfront are planning to add hundreds of bike racks at those buildings. I’m not sure about bike shower rooms. That project will include office, residential, retail, dining and entertainment.
FYI – Nearly all of the Downtown DC BID and Golden Triangle BID bike racks are mapped on RackSpotter now. I rode down almost every single block of every single street in those areas throughout 2015. In this case, it would be accurate to say I “literally” rode or ran or walked along every single block of every street in about 99 percent of central DC (north of Independence Ave, from NoMa to Dupont Circle and lower Georgetown). Since the BIDs continued to add new bike racks into the fall and winter, I may not have mapped all of the racks. But I think I got to just about every single rack in place by late summer plus a few of the ones installed over the fall. (With photos of every single rack in those neighborhoods added to the map. Well, I might have messed up one or two of the photo uploads.) I think the info is useful. Otherwise BikeArlington wouldn’t have started the project. Plus I found it interesting to explore all the nooks and crannies of DC, good and bad, that I would never have looked at otherwise.
.
I am convinced that is why my building redid theirs. Our old bike room is on a basement level, and required taking the bike up on an elevator and through the lobby. And getting a key from the concierge (out of luck if you want to access it before or after concierge hours – I missed at least one HDCC because the concierge got in late) And filled to the brim with seldom ridden bikes, including at least one kid’s tricycle. I alway did manage to find a space, but it was sometimes an unpleasant experience.
