New York City's oddly long struggle to give people a safe place lock their bikes up outdoors will bear fruit this year thanks to millions of dollars in Mayor Mamdani's budget for a network of secure bike lockers.
Nine years after the city announced an unrealized plan for secure bike parking, Mamdani wants $25 million to build a network of 500 bike lockers as part of a contract the city awarded to California-based Tranzito last year.
After almost a decade of stasis, the administration's plan has cycling advocates excited that New York City will finally adopt global best practices that backwaters like London and Paris and Amsterdam have already figured out.
"It's nice to see a down payment and a commitment to a secure bike parking program," said Transportation Alternatives Executive Director Ben Furnas. "Having a network of secure bike parking facilities across the city, as there is in lots of other global cities, is just a great way to make it a lot easier for people to get around way more affordably and hop on a bike."
That said, there's still not much known about exactly how the program will work.
Last year, the Department of Transportation selected Tranzito to build out and operate the program with a mix of smaller secure lockers in residential areas and larger high-capacity facilities in commercial areas and near transit hubs. The lockers should also accommodate cargo bikes, and the larger hubs may include a way to charge e-bikes.
Mamdani's proposed funding builds on very marginal progress made by former Mayor Eric Adams, who pledged to build bike parking but never got further than a roving pilot program his first year in office that brought a bike locker from homegrown bike parking company Oonee to neighborhoods around the city.
After that pilot, the Adams administration didn't even issue a request for proposals for a citywide bike parking program until 2024. Despite a press release at the time that said the first bike lockers would be on city streets by 2025, the city took another 20 months to announce Tranzito had won the RFP.
Given the struggle to get any positive attention on the program from the Adams administration, advocates were heartened by the fact that Mamdani's team highlighted the money that it planned to spend on bike parking in the same way it highlighted its planned spending increases for bus lanes and bike lanes.
"It's great that it's in [the budget] and that the mayor spotlighted it in the increases they were giving to DOT, that suggests there's leadership support," said Jon Orcutt, a former DOT policy official in the Bloomberg administration.
But 500 units for a city of 8.5 million people is a small, almost pilot-level start compared to the way European cities have embraced bike parking, Orcutt said.
The local government of the borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, which is part of London, announced in 2024 that it was going to install 500 bike hangars on its own to serve a population of under 200,000. Another London borough, Waltham Forest, population 279,737, has installed 1,000 bike parking hangars.
New York City can't exactly copy the London model, since it has a different way of paying for projects, but Orcutt predicted the demand for the lockers will grow in a similar way to the demand for Citi Bike after it launched in 2013.
"Once it gets going, I think it foments its own demand, which is how it worked in London. One of the reasons it's so big in London, is that you do have local borough governments with budgets who can respond fairly quickly to the demand for stuff like that, especially if the borough next door is doing it there," Orcutt said. "In New York, we're not going to have that, but once you start doing it, it'll be like Citi Bike, people will be saying, 'Where's ours?'"
When DOT announced the contract for Tranzito, officials said the contract would begin in some form in May this year, something Transportation Commissioner Mike Flynn confirmed at City Council members on Tuesday. Reached for comment for this story, an agency spokesperson said DOT would share more details on the placement of the units and the mix of the lockers in the near future.
"The lack of secure bike parking is one of the biggest barriers to entry when it comes to biking in New York City," said DOT spokesperson Vin Barone. "The upcoming citywide launch of this program will be a game-changer for New York City cyclists and families who might lack in-home bike storage space, or cannot carry heavier e-bikes and cargo bikes up stairs in apartment buildings."
As for where DOT should focus on placing the lockers when that work actually begins, Orcutt and Furnas both said the city should make sure subway stops at the end of some subway lines get lockers to encourage people to bike to transit.
The city should consider bike parking as a piece of the larger transportation network, not just a bike-only amenity, Furnas said.
"Ideally all of these things would be planned in coordination with the network of protected bike lanes, transit stations," he said. "These should be thought of as part of a blended transportation system, not just a one-off thing, just for bikes, but to help people get around New York more broadly."
