Bicycle Parking

For a Reasonable Price on Bike Parking, Try Brooklyn

The Bicycle Access to Garages Law is in effect, but just because you can park your bike in a garage, doesn't mean you want to. At many garages, the prices are absurdly high. At 62nd and Columbus, a month of bike parking costs $175. One garage at Bowery and Canal charges $211.19 for a month and asks cyclists to pay the same daily rates as car owners.

By Noah Kazis

12:41 PM EDT on July 1, 2010

The Bicycle Access to Garages Law is in effect, but just because you can park your bike in a garage, doesn’t mean you want to. At many garages, the prices are absurdly high. At 62nd and Columbus, a month of bike parking costs $175. One garage at Bowery and Canal charges $211.19 for a month and asks cyclists to pay the same daily rates as car owners.

A Streetsblog reader sent along the above photo of a relative bargain: $4.59 for a day of parking, $22.96 for a month. This garage also doesn’t charge the illegally inflated 18.375 percent tax rate, which is supposed to be applied only to motor vehicle parking.

The garage is in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn (on St. Marks Avenue, between Underhill and Vanderbilt, to be precise), so we’re not talking about a big commuter destination. While the comparison to Manhattan garages might not be apples-to-apples, this could still be an attractive bike storage service for someone who lives in a fourth floor walk-up or needs all the space they can get inside their home (it sure beats the prices at StorageMart).

It also shows that bike parking prices can range by at least a factor of ten. That drives home the need for some way to compare bike prices. There are already websites that offer this service for car parking. With such a wide range of prices in this new market for bike parking, it could be an even greater service for cyclists.

Noah Kazis

Noah joined Streetsblog as a New York City reporter at the start of 2010. When he was a kid, he collected subway paraphernalia in a Vignelli-map shoebox. Before coming to Streetsblog, he blogged at TheCityFix DC and worked as a field organizer for the Obama campaign in Toledo, Ohio. Noah graduated from Yale University, where he wrote his senior thesis on the class politics of transportation reform in New York City. He lives in Morningside Heights.

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