Williamsburg Bike Parking Woes

3:14 PM EDT on July 25, 2006

A Streetsblog tipster writes in with a nice slice-of-life dispatch:

I was on North 7th street in Williamsburg this morning and I passed a young woman locking up her bike in front of a residential building. There were a handful of old-timers in front of their building complaining about the bikes -- "pretty soon there'll be no sidewalk left" etc. It struck me because it was about two blocks from the much-publicized NYPD bike-lock-cutting & impounding that happened outside of the Bedford Ave subway this past year. It's clear that there are not enough bike racks in this area. It creates a hassle for cyclists and annoys longtime neighborhood residents. Again, the cyclists are viewed as the problem.

If only there were some place they could put those bike racks. Wait a minute--

Above is a picture that Aaron Naparstek took in Montreal, showing some two dozen parked bikes, most of them occupying street space that might otherwise have been land-guzzled by just two automobiles. To recap, that's 24 bikes or 2 cars. Let's put that to the test: Which parking space allotment would 19th-century British utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham say tended to promote the greatest good for the greatest number?

Aaron Donovan

Before he began blogging about land use and transportation, Aaron Donovan wrote The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund's annual fundraising appeal for three years and earned a master's degree in urban planning from Columbia. Since then, he has worked for nonprofit organizations devoted to New York City economic development. He lives and works in the Financial District, and sees New York's pre-automobile built form as an asset that makes New York unique in the United States, and as a strategic advantage that should be capitalized upon.

Stay in touch

More from Streetsblog New York City

Congestion Pricing

Stockholm Leader’s Message to NYC: ‘Congestion Pricing Just Works’

"In Stockholm, people really thought that congestion pricing would be the end of the world, the city will come to a standstill, no one would be able to get to work anymore and all the theaters and shops would just go bankrupt. None of that happened."