Mandatory bicycle parking – finally coming to Auckland!
Cities overseas had it long ago. Even Hamilton had it for many years, and Auckland is now finally catching up: new buildings will soon have to provide cycle parking – public spaces for visitors and secure storage for staff. As well as showers & lockers!
With the draft Unitary Plan now released (check here if you want to know more), the rules for the first time provide a comprehensive requirement for bike parking in any new development that gets built / redeveloped. While we will have to look at the numbers a bit more closely, most of them look good at first glance (EDIT: the lack of visitor bike parking for retail and restaurants – at least for developments larger than a certain minimum – is an issue).
The above isn’t final of course – the Unitary Plan will be subject to all sorts of submissions and appeals in the coming years. Some will be from people and organisations which consider providing cycle parking a waste of money and requiring them a “nanny state” rule (though you probably didn’t hear them complain about the mandatory CAR parking requirements of the past).
But this is already a great step forward to making providing for cycling a normal part of buildings as well as roads – whether or not the numbers get tweaked a bit in the end doesn’t really matter.
Fullers (CAA Sponsor)
Themocracy
Mandatory parking requirements for cars have been a disaster. Is the equivalent for bikes really to be celebrated?
In my opinion – YES.
You will notice that these rules still tread extremely lightly. No requirements for smaller residential dwellings for example. No requirements for retail at all – which is something I missed in the first run-through, and which is really rather ridiculous.
The only thing that is somewhat ambitious is the office rate, which would provide for 10% of the people working at a building to cycle, and which will currently still over-supply (but watch that number shrink during the submissions process – and remember that a new building will be around for 40-plus years).
These rules are to me, the equivalent of a minimum quality provision. Like you expect certain levels of noise or heat insulation.
It’s also not really fair to compare car parking to bike parking, the latter can be installed very cheaply in a very small footprint, the former requires quite a lot if extra land, space, and engineering to allow egress.
It also makes complete sense that new apartment buildings are required to provide space for bike storage, it’s ridiculous the number of balconies you see that have bikes stored in them.
I had to turn a storage locker into a vertical hanging space for my bike, and still have to turn my bike sideways to be able to close the door. My girlfriend’s bike of course has no dedicated place where I can put it at all…
Yes it was a shock moving to an apartment in Auckkand after Europe to find no storage space for bikes, luckily I was able to get some space assigned in the loading bay of the building.
That stuff is outside for us – easily reached from the street if one is a bit determined, so useless for a space where a bike might stay for days or weeks on end. So no luck here. These rules would have prevented that from happening…