Bicycle Parking

Eyes on the Street: Uprooted CityRack

A tipster sends this picture of one of the city's new bike racks that, someway, somehow, got wrenched out of the pavement. We're told that the sidewalk at Fulton Street and Rockwell Place in Brooklyn had a big chunk missing where the bike rack would have been.

By Ben Fried

3:41 PM EDT on September 3, 2010

A tipster sends this picture of one of the city’s new bike racks that, someway, somehow, got wrenched out of the pavement. We’re told that the sidewalk at Fulton Street and Rockwell Place in Brooklyn had a big chunk missing where the bike rack would have been.

After this bike rack design won a 2008 competition to replace the U-rack as the city’s standard unit of on-street bike parking, NYC DOT committed to installing 5,000 of them within three years.

I don’t know what tore this one out. Maybe a car ran up on the sidewalk and knocked it loose, or maybe someone yanked it out with their bare hands. If it was vandalism, the nice thing about this rack design is that, unlike a U-rack, ripping it out of the sidewalk doesn’t really help someone steal the bike. Still, it seems like the bolts anchoring this thing in the ground could stand to be sturdier.

If you see a busted bike rack, here’s where to report it to NYC DOT.

Ben Fried

Ben Fried started as a Streetsblog reporter in 2008 and led the site as editor-in-chief from 2010 to 2018. He lives in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, with his wife.