This Juneteenth, thousands of our members will take to the streets on rides of celebration and reflection. As the leaders of Brooklyn’s biggest Black cycling clubs, this holiday has always been special; it’s a time for our community to come together and to commemorate the official start of our summer season.
The vibes are incandescent. Our members come from all walks of the community — we have artists, young professionals, entrepreneurs, athletes, retirees — but the question we get is often the same:
“Do you know a good place to park a bike?”
Black New York loves to bike, but New York doesn’t love Black people on bikes. We live in neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyesant, Brownsville and East Flatbush where the apartments are small, stairs are steep, and doors are narrow. Many of us don’t have access to fancy bike rooms or garages and even when we do there’s rarely a good place to park at work or school. Leaving a bike on the sidewalk overnight or while at work often results in a missing tire or gearset, but for most of us, it’s only a matter of time until the entire frame disappears.
These days a nice bike for everyday riders can cost thousands of dollars; and that's money that most of our members, and most New Yorkers period, just can’t afford to lose.
So, we ride less. Not because we won’t, but we can’t. The lack of secure parking means the risk of losing thousands of dollars to a bike thief isn’t worth a quick ride to the grocery store. Riding to work isn’t practical when you have to haul your bike up and down the stairs each morning. Cycling home from school can’t happen when your bike’s tire gets swiped after being left outside.
Our members can ride together to celebrate Juneteenth, but New York’s lack of secure parking stops us from riding within our daily routines.
We’re not alone. Nationally, half of all Black people say that secure bike parking will allow us to ride more often. Locally, in a densely populated city where a quarter of households report losing at least one bike to theft, the figure is sure to be much higher. Secure parking makes cycling accessible.
Yes, we have Citi Bike and it's appreciated for shorter trips, but we prefer our own bikes. London has a thriving bikeshare system and 30,000 public secure parking spaces. Paris has one of the original bikeshare networks, but the city is rolling out thousands of secure parking spaces. New York has 68.
Not 68 stations, but 68 spaces for a city of 8.5 million.
Given the outsized role that secure parking plays in our collective cycling experience, it’s not surprising that the advocates who have fought to develop the city’s few existing facilities hail from our community. We’ve watched the fight — it goes back to 1999! — and those who know, know that it hasn’t been easy.
New York planned its first real citywide pilot in 2017, then that didn’t happen. Then there was a pilot at Water-Whitehall that had to be removed thanks to red-tape in 2019. That same year there was supposed to be a citywide request for proposals, but ... nope.
In the same time period, the Port Authority and Jersey City have figured it out; the latter launched a citywide network of parking and charging stations in 2023 with the same advocates that have been fighting to do it here. We rejoiced when, after an extremely popular pilot in 2022, the city committed to an ambitious network of 500 stations to begin launching this year.
This was exactly the breakthrough that we were hoping for. This would be the next Citi Bike; cycling would become as accessible to New Yorkers as it was to Londoners and Parisians. We were so excited.
The system would finally allow us to use our bikes for everyday trips. It would help us reduce dependence on cars and reduce time it takes to get to the nearest subway or select bus in neighborhoods like Canarsie, Flatlands and East Flatbush. It would reduce the impact of theft, saving New Yorkers millions of dollars each year in property losses.
But more than a year since the program announcement filled with quotes from administration officials and civic leaders, there haven’t been any more details from the Department of Transportation, raising concerns from our community.
Speaking from the perspective of Black people who bike, a citywide secure parking system seems like such an easy win to deliver for our community and all working class New Yorkers; easy to design, easy to implement and easy to manage. Plus, bike parking technology has been proven to help stop e-bike related fires and prevent tragedies like those we’ve seen throughout the five boroughs, by keeping bikes outside of homes.
What is taking the city so long to move forward?
That’s why we are demanding a timeline from the DOT for implementing New York’s Secure Bike Parking Program.
Every day this program stalls, bikes are stolen or dismembered on our streets. These everyday crimes hurt our neighborhood quality of life and create conditions that are damaging to public safety.
New York is closer than ever to implementing a program that has been promised for nearly a decade. It’s time to get to the finish line.
