The City Wants To Know Where You Want Secure Bike Parking

Bike parking? Lots.

The Mamdani administration is taking the next step to bring secure bike parking to the Big Apple, with a new website inviting New Yorkers to weigh in on where they want the city to put the new bike lockers and what kind of bells and whistles should accompany them.

Beginning Monday, anyone interested in bringing secure bike parking to their neighborhood can chime in on the Department of Transportation’s Secure Bike Parking Portal, which the agency will use to help guide where it installs 500 new bike lockers as part of the long-awaited effort to give New Yorkers with tiny apartments safe places to parking their bikes.

“Many New Yorkers, especially families, opt out of bike ownership because they lack the storage space in their homes — especially for larger family-oriented cargo bikes,” DOT Commissioner Mike Flynn said in a statement.

The feedback map will be familiar to anyone who has delved into DOT’s Citi Bike siting maps, which the agency uses to determine where to put new bike-share docks.

In addition to asking where to put bike lockers, DOT also wants the public to share what kind of bike they need to store (e.g., acoustic, e-bike, cargo bike or adaptive bike), for how long (i.e., short-term or long-term, overnights or weekends) and what kind of amenities they want to see — like e-bike charging, air pumps for tires or bike repair tools.

DOT officials say they want to create a mix of smaller bike parking lockers in residential areas and higher-capacity ones in commercial districts. The public will have to pay to use the storage, and DOT will provide discount memberships for low-income New Yorkers.

Secure bike parking has long been a missing piece of the city’s cycling ecosystem, since many New Yorkers either don’t lack the room in their homes to store bikes or don’t have the wherewithal to carry them up multiple flights of stairs.

Research has shown that forcing people to deal with the perils of leaving bikes outside and exposed to the elements or theft reduces the number of cyclists and increased the instances of bike theft.

With the beginning of the station siting process, Mayor Mamdani moves closer than any of his predecessors to creating a citywide secure bike parking program who has attempted it.

“Hallelujah, we’ve been waiting for this program for, I don’t know how many years,” said Jon Orcutt, a former DOT policy official who helped launch Citi Bike under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Former Mayor Bill de Blasio made a run at bringing sheltered bike parking to the city with a 2017 proposal for three initial pilot locations, but that effort petered out by 2020 without any new bike parking creator.

De Blasio’s successor Eric Adams talked a big game about changing the city’s “culture of can’t” when he took office and even seemed to find a way around strict procurement rules by partnering with local secure bike parking startup Oonee for a roving pilot to see how New Yorkers responded to the presence of the bike locker (they responded well).

But after the Oonee pilot the city took two years to actually put out a Request for Proposals for a citywide program, and waited close to another two years to pick California-based vendor Tranzito in the last month of Adams’s tenure. The abrupt announcement drew an administrative challenge from Oonee, which accused the city of shortchanging the homegrown company and neglecting to explain how it lost out to Tranzito.

The Mamdani administration has moved ahead with the bike parking program despite its multi-billion dollar budget shortfall. The mayor included $25 million for program in his budget proposal in March, and has committed to launching it this year.

“It’s great. It’s good to see [the site] coming out. That makes it a lot more inevitable now that the city is saying it’s real,” said Orcutt.