The most annoying moment in any bike ride: pulling up to a new destination and seeing no bike rack or even signpost to lock your bike to.
I was riding with some family on the Children of the Sun Trail last year when we stopped in Hillyard for a coffee and snack from Derailer Coffee. Unfortunately, we very quickly realized there was no bike rack on Market Street between Olympic Avenue and Queen Avenue. We ended up locking our four bikes to one another and to a bench, but that crowded an already narrow sidewalk.
We activists and infrastructure nerds talk a lot about bike facility networks: the importance of bike lanes, shared-use paths and greenways. But an underrecognized piece in the bike commuting puzzle is bike parking.
Even if you have a safe route to get from point A to point B, if you don’t have a safe place to lock up your bike while you work or shop or learn or eat, you’ll probably choose another (higher environmental impact, polluting, space inefficient) mode of transport, or forgo the trip altogether.
Insufficient bike parking also impacts multimodal trips: you can drive to an STA Park & Ride and safely leave your car while you take transit to your work, but only five of 14 Park & Rides have rentable bike lockers, and only a few others have racks at all.
Unfortunately, due to both regulations and engineering practices, our city has built significantly more spots to safely leave a car than safely lock up a bike.
Meanwhile, in the Netherlands, Utrecht’s beautiful bike parking garage accommodates nearly 13,000 bikes at the city’s transit hub. But there’s hope for Spokane as the city plays catch-up with Utrecht.
The Good News, part I
Even with (very valid) complaints about a lack of bike parking, there is still probably more than you might realize, and you probably don’t have to resort to playing iSpy with the Google Street View of your destination! Instead, you can find it on this crowdsourced map, which was originally created 15 years ago by a local bike commuter and Bicycle Advisory Board member, and is still being maintained by the community.
If you know of spots that aren’t on this map, please add them! It’s super easy.
I recently added two pins at the ONE Spokane Stadium for the two fantastic, very conveniently located bike corrals there – both of which were completely full during a Spokane Zephyr game I attended last summer.
Horrifyingly, I was forced to park my bike a full block away at The Podium! Kidding of course; I’ve never been happier to be forced to find overflow parking.
The Good News, part II
Spokane city passed a resolution in 2023 that requires some multifamily and commercial developers to provide bike parking – sometimes short term, sometimes long term, and sometimes both. Short term is the type typically reserved for visitors while long term is more appropriate for residents and employees.
The city also enforces design standards for the racks. Short term racks must allow for two points of locking, as seen in the inverted U racks, which is the city’s recommended style. Long term parking is required to be impervious and secured, like a locked bike storage room, or a locked bike shed.
The inverted U, the gold standard for short term bike parking. Kinetic’s EZ-U
Now before you say “Lauren, we need to unburden developers so more housing gets built,” keep in mind these bike parking regulations were put in place as the city removed minimum car parking regulations – first near transit, then city-wide.
A single car parking spot typically requires 300 square feet of space, including the approach, while this two-bike locker has a 20 square feet footprint. When building infill projects is the best way for our city to grow and get out of our housing crisis, we must be space-conscious.
This locker fits two bikes. Madrax’s Madlocker
Costs are similarly imbalanced: this two-bike locker costs $3,000 – so let’s estimate $2,000 per bike with a concrete pad and labor costs – whereas the Sightline Institute has found that one car parking spot in a surface lot costs $5,000 to $20,000 to build while costs for one structured garage spot can cost $60,000.
The costs of parking construction are, of course, passed along to renters or buyers of the housing, or patrons of the businesses. Yes, your grocery bills pay for the massive parking lots in front of each grocery store. And Sightline estimates that each car parking spot adds $200 per month in rent.
The Good News, part III
If your old apartment or favorite brewery doesn’t have bike racks yet, there’s still hope: the city has a program where anyone can request a bike rack for any location that doesn’t yet have a rack. The folks in the Planning Department will review the request, then requests are batched together for periodic install. The locations have to be on city right-of-way – think sidewalks, parking strips, shoulders – but the planners will do their best to put any bike rack close to the establishment’s door while not blocking doors or pedestrian routes.
Later this spring or early summer, the city will be installing roughly 50 new racks across the city – both single racks and racks grouped into corrals. Exact locations are still being nailed down, but racks are tentatively planned near Heritage Bar and Kitchen, Brick West Brewing*, Ferguson’s Diner on Garland Avenue, Bellwether Brewing on Monroe Street, Elliots An Urban Kitchen, the new apartment building on Monroe Street and Shannon Avenue and several other spots around town.
A map of 30 or so tentatively planned racks being installed this year. Each location will receive between one and three racks, each of which accommodate two bikes. Another 20 or so will be added elsewhere in the city. Full interactive map.
You might notice that several of these are in the North Monroe Business District. The city received a few requests in the area, and the planners took the opportunity to fill in some nearby gaps in the bike parking network (which makes for a more efficient installation process too). We can thank the much-maligned 2018 road diet for providing plenty of room for street furniture, planters, lampposts and bike racks, as it widened sidewalks and created wide corner bulbouts at each intersection.
I personally requested a corral at Derailer Coffee in Hillyard in anticipation of more mid-ride coffee stops as the Children of the Sun Trail expands and revitalization of the Hillyard Historic Business District continues, especially the recent opening of Hillyard Bicycle just south of Derailer. The corral request is still under review, so fingers crossed the planners can make it work.
The planners tell me they are eyeing other centers and corridors, like Perry and Garland, for the remaining 20 or so racks in this batch. I’ll update the crowdsourced map after the batch’s install later this year.
*Speaking of Brick West Brewing, if you’re reading this, you might enjoy an urbanism-themed bike ride I’m hosting with RANGE city hall reporter Erin Sellers on May 22nd at 5:30 pm. We’ll check out a handful of infrastructure and building projects, then end at Brick West for some social time.
