Nicole Parker

As a cyclist in this city for 15+ years, (6 out of necessity), I can tell you confidently that a bike rack is so much more than a bike rack.

It’s one of the cheapest pieces of transportation infrastructure a city can install requiring a few hundred dollars, a few square feet of sidewalk (pending ADA compliance), some concrete and bolts. In a city with a Climate Equity Action Plan promising neighborhoods where everyone can bike to meet their daily needs, some neighborhoods still have no real answer for what happens when these cyclists arrive.

My conversations with business owners revealed that they end up wrestling with the city for racks, sometimes some for years, or just buying their own. Leaving them paying out of pocket to put public infrastructure in the public right-of-way. The same types of small businesses I see posting every week asking for support as their paper thin margins keep getting squeezed. This isn’t an expense they should be shouldering to make sure patrons stick around when they arrive.

The funny part is every office I’ve talked to gets it. Sustainability more than sees how it fits their RVAgreen 2050 initiatives. DPW already has a budget and is installing racks, making our call was less about why and more about where. (Businesses are the eyes and ears of these neighborhoods after all!) Economic development funds Activation and Beautification grants that help shoulder the lift of making previously disinvested neighborhoods more appealing and easier for small businesses to move in or stay. However, these funds rarely make it to the aprons in front of the businesses themselves, the exact place a rack would live and encourage people to stop and hang a while.

Workforce sees the part most people miss. For a lot of people in this city a bike isn’t just for recreation, it’s how you get to a job shift and how you get home, (hopefully safely!) OAR, which works with people returning from incarceration, built a whole program around this called Ride 2 Reentry. It provides a bike, education, lights, a helmet and a lock. Only problem is a a lock needs something to lock to…

I’m not under any illusion that a rack is the final answer to any of these questions. However, it feels like the smallest possible test of whether we can collaborate on something that helps our city flourish. If we can get it right with something simple like bike racks, we have a fighting chance of getting it right on bike lanes and better pedestrian infrastructure. Especially in our Vision Zero era!