In the first session on Bike Parking Practices, we heard Matthew Callow from the City of Vancouver who has developed a bike parking strategy for short-term bike parking and rack placement in Vancouver (presentation). We then heard from Shane Rhodes from the City of Eugene, Oregon, who shared several projects to improve the quality of the bicycle parking in schools and throughout the city. It was fun to learn that Shane is also the co-founder of Kidical Mass, which is soon coming to Barcelona on 15 May 2022 (www.kidicalmass.cat). The next speaker, Marco Mulder, from Arup, took us to Netherlands where they have engaged with residents in the Hague to evaluate the quality and placement of bike parking infrastructure (presentation).
The second group of speakers focused on Bike Parking Research. Ralph Buehler synthesised the academic literature on bicycle parking and review the main findings of an article written with Eva Heinen in Transportation Reviews, titled Bicycle Parking: a systematic review of scientific literature on parking behaviour, parking preferences and their influence on cycling and travel behaviour. Victoria Ortega presented the recent work by the team at City Lab Barcelona which has analysed the occupancy patterns of on-street bicycle parking in Barcelona (presentation). This study is one of the first city-wide examinations of bike type and rotation times for bikes parked on city streets. Using an innovative method that tagged parked bicycles with stickers, the study found that 35% of bicycles parked in Barcelona are parked as long-term storage. Finally, Anne Brown from the University of Oregon presented her work with Nicholas Klein and Calvin Thigpen on the perceptions of scooter misparking and possible policy intervention. Their work evaluates the incidence of misparking, the reasons that lead scooter riders to mispark, and the public perception and policy interventions to address misparking. It was interesting to learn that perceptions of urban disorder are motivated by untidy scooter parking, not necessarily illegal scooter parking.
The last session was devoted to Bike Parking Futures. Ceri Woolsgrove from the European Cyclist Federation (ECF) presented a detailed review of how ECF would like to improve the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive so that it better accommodates the needs of cyclists. The last two speakers, Ton Kooymans, from the Dutch Bike Parking Academy and Sander van de Vecht, from BikeBox (presentation) both from Netherlands, were designers and entrepreneurs who are designing and building innovative technologies to improve the bike parking experience.
In addition to top-notch speakers, the event was attended by experienced professionals, consultants and researchers, including HUB Cycling in Metro Vancouver. The exit survey showed interest in fostering an international community working on bike parking issues. As a follow up to the event, we will develop a list-serve to ease communication among participants. If you are interested in joining this listserve, please contact us at bikeparking@citylabbcn.org.
