Treadly and Me

A new shopping centre was recently installed not too far from our home—nothing really huge: just a supermarket and a few other speciality shops. It might turn out to be a handy place to shop for the regular groceries.

On visiting it for the first time a few weeks ago, I was pleasantly surprised (read: "frankly shocked") to find that within the two levels of underground parking, there was dedicated bicycle parking. True, it's tucked away in a quiet corner but there are ample parking rails inside a lockable cage (although I'm not quite sure what benefit that provides).

Part of the plan?

I guess I shouldn't have been so surprised, given that the local municipality recognises in its Bicycle Plan that:

Bicycle parking for employees, residents and visitors needs to be provided at retail, commercial and recreational centres.

Furthermore:

Some of the key issues that need to be addressed when considering parking facilities

are:

• location should be close to the facility being used;

• it should be in a relatively open area with good security; and

• it should be of an appropriate design

You can pretty much check all of the boxes there. I may be harshly judging the developer and/or centre management, but it seems unlikely that they would have installed such facilities unless required to do so. Clearly this is a local government that takes utility cycling far more seriously than the one in my area.

Lost in implementation?

Yesterday, I rode up to visit the new supermarket and sought out the bike parking. Here's what I found:

I'm not sure if this happened for the convenience of centre staff or because of the laziness of other shoppers, but I'd guess at the latter. Notice that the trolleys are the type that need to lock to another so that you can retrieve your money? Once you get one of these left somewhere, they multiply as more people click-in their empty trolleys to get their dollar back. So hopefully it was just an unfortunate one-off.

Luckily for me, not all of the parking rails were blocked like this, so I was able to park.

Previously I hadn't noticed that there is some overflow bike parking just nearby. Unfortunately, it was somewhat inaccessible:

I thought the idea was to lock up your bike to the bike rails, not lock up the bike rails themselves? But hey, what do I know? I only ride a bike.

Put this all together and what looked promising initially seems to be losing something important in the implementation. The presence of half-decent bike parking might just encourage a few more people to ride to the shops. This is a good thing. But if they find when they get there that they actually can't park securely because the secure parking is inaccessible (e.g. being locked or used as storage) they will be put off (and pissed off). This is a bad thing.

A traffic flow aside

I will note in passing that I have noticed already that this brand new car park has appalling natural traffic flow and on busy days two security bods are required to direct cars to the (usually deserted) lower level. The replacement of even 1-in-10 of those cars with bikes would go a long way towards eliminating the traffic problem.

Of course, it would've helped if the architects and developers had given a bit more thought to traffic flow in the car park too…