Cycle bays - waste of space?

On Friday, I had to pop up to town for a lunch appointment in Kensington
High Street.

Of course, as the councils have been ripping out motorcycle bays, or
making them smaller, and as the ones that are left are filled with
scooterbois who don't know how to park, finding a space is rather
tricky.

What intrigued me was how down the centre of KHS, they'd installed cycle
parking, with those gigantic great metal rails to chain bicycles to. OK,
good idea.

Except the rails are set about six feet apart, and each rail 'contains'
precisely two bicycles, one on each side, because (I suppose) if
someone's already chained their bicycle to the rail, chaining a second
one on the same side is rather tricky.

In short, what a fucking waste of space. Bleeding acres of space that
could be used for disabled parking, or bus bays, or (yes) a motorcycle
bay or two would be nice, in order to accommodate a very few dozen
politically correct bicycles.

There's got to be way of using the space to hold more bicycles securely
in the given area. Hasn't there?

 

Give your man Boris a shout, he has managed to pack half a dozen away
where no one can see them so he should know.

 

>,
says...

Round here they space them sensibly at about 3 feet apart.

They also allow 2 hours free bike parking in the pay and display areas
on the street.

 

Bury the Town Councillors bum up.
--
Dave
GS850x2 XS650 SE6a

Teach a man to fish and he and his pikey mates will have the
river cleaned out in a day.

 

Curmudgeon
says...

But then they'll still be able to talk local politics.

 

Amsterdam seems to have solved it:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/doesnotcompute/190220421/

 

Is that the one by the cental station?

It's always been rammed full of bikes on the occasions I've walked past
it.

--
Dan L

Too much time to think, too little to do.


http://thebikeshed.spaces.live.com/
1996 Kawasaki ZR1100 Zephyr

BOTAFOT #140 (KotL 2005/6/7)
X-FOT#000
DIAABTCOD #26
BOMB#18 (slow)
OMF#11

 

Aye, tis that.

Indeed. For those cloggies who commute by train, it's fairly common to
have two bikes. One at home station and one at destination station, so
as not to have to fill the train with bikes.

 

My impression of cyclists in Amsterdam was they were silent killers.
Nearly go mowed down on several occasions.

--
Dan L

Too much time to think, too little to do.


http://thebikeshed.spaces.live.com/
1996 Kawasaki ZR1100 Zephyr

BOTAFOT #140 (KotL 2005/6/7)
X-FOT#000
DIAABTCOD #26
BOMB#18 (slow)
OMF#11

 

And the more pre-1940 they look, the better!

 

Using the patented Mavis Beacon "Hunt&Peck" Technique, ogden

Pre-1940 bikes in the Netherlands? I think not:

"Where's my bike?"

--
Wicked Uncle Nigel - "He's hopeless, but he's honest"

WS* GHPOTHUF#24 APOSTLE#14 DLC#1 COFF#20 BOTAFOT#150 HYPO#0(KoTL) IbW#41
SBS#39 OMF#6 Enfield 500 Curry House Racer "The Basmati Rice Burner",
Honda GL1000K2 (Fallen apart)
Suzuki TS250 "The Africa Single" Honda ST1100 wiv trailer Norton 850 Commando
Kawasaki GTR1400

 

Not with a knobbly stuck in their gobs.
--
Dave
GS850x2 XS650 SE6a

Teach a man to fish and he and his pikey mates will have the
river cleaned out in a day.

 

Heh. The first area I lived in was a sailing/holiday area that attracted
lots of non-cloggies. The cloggy kids would taunt something along the
lines of "does your granddad still hve my granddad's bike".

 

That's exactly the point. AIUI, cloggies are rather proud of old bikes
for precisely that reason. Or, at least, the cloggies I've known have
been.

 

Sucking his keyboard for inspiration, Paul Corfield typed:

On the first day of a cycling holiday in NL a few years ago, I stopped at a
marked road crossing as a red MGB came tonking up the road. I was utterly
gobsmacked when he smoked to a stop and waved me across. Later on the same
holiday, I had a Dr Who moment as my wife and I (riding side by side) met
four Dutch schoolkids (riding side by side) coming the other way, on a path
that was no more than 10 feet wide. We were all going too fast to stop, and
I just shut my eyes. Seconds later, we had passed them, having apparently
dematerialised to molecular level, passed through, and then rematerialised
on the other side. Awesome skills - we saw a woman cycling through the
centre of Arnhem with three children and two bags of shopping distributed
around the bike - not to mention the baby in a papoose on her back. Lovely
country.

 

Allegedly, when the Cloggies play the Boxheads at footie, one Cloggie
chant is "Grandma wants her bicycle back."

Can any of our tame cloggies confirm?

 

message

Yep and we call them "skips" as a rule.


--
Beav

VN 750
Zed 1000
OMF# 19

 

well, most scooters are light enough to pick up and aren't fitted
with annoying alarms, so you can just budge them over to make space.

 

heh - I thought it was just me that did that.

 

great minds think alike and all that