If they can have handicap parking, wheelchair ramps, and other accessibility features (rightfully so!), what’s the problem with helping businesses to make their stores accessible by bike?
Everyone wants to support “buy local”, and there’s no better way to do it than by bike!
Seems like installing a simple bike rack would be a win-win-win all around. What exactly is the difficulty?
I don’t believe for a second that it’s a “they don’t know unless you tell them” problem, because I’ve contacted many, MANY stores and plaza management to let them know that they are losing business. Nothing changes.
And it’s not like they can’t see people locking their bikes to signs, trees, fences, or cluttering up the walkways because they have no other options when visiting their business.
Backstory: Over the last two years, I’ve been adding cycling infrastructure to OpenStreetMap. Stuff like bike lanes, bike parking, repair stands, etc. I’ve spent dozens of hours checking plazas in a 30 km radius, local storefronts, malls, etc., to see what options they offer. It’s SHOCKING to see how many have absolutely no bike parking. Large stores, post offices, coffee shops, or even gyms. I try to contact as many as I can, but almost never receive replies or acknowledgement. Contacting local representatives is even more futile, as they have no control over what these businesses do. This means I’m either going far out of my way to visit stores that have bike parking, or I take a car, which seems like madness either way.
They only have handicap parking because they were forced to by law. They only have wheelchair ramps because they were forced to by law. They only have accessibility features because they were forced to by law. See where I’m going with this?
Shit, they have a fuckload more parking than they need because it is mandated by law. Remove car parking minimums and set up bike parking minimums instead.
Then you get voted out by car people who shriek that you hate cars and are trying to create a hostile environment for drivers by having a single bike rack somewhere out of the way.
Sucks to say but hopefully some climate change policy will eventually incentivize by law to have businesses to accomodate more things on 2-wheels.
For sure.
Unfortunately, I spoke with local council members about this, and they said they can’t force a company to add bike parking. There are no laws that require them to do so, even though I would STRONGLY argue that it falls into the same accessibility category as wheelchair/pregnant/handicap parking accommodations.
I think you’d be laughed out of the room, if you tried to use disability law to force bicycle accommodations, and the people with disabilities would probably be angry with you. But there’s no reason whatsoever that they can’t make a new law or bylaw, mandating bicycle stuff.
Well, I also represent the disabled community, so they’d probably be told they were bigots for laughing. LOL
But in seriousness, accessibility had a broad scope.
It’s not always about accommodating someone in a wheelchair.
Accessibility could mean offering more than one language, offering different forms of access (i.e. digital, print, audio, etc.), and in the case of shopping, giving people the ability so safely access your store by bike.
Not having a place for bike parking makes a business inaccessible to a great number of people. So while it would be nice if there are laws forcing this to happen, it still makes no sense why a company wouldn’t voluntarily want to do it. They are losing business for no good reason.
Businesses do the bare minimum unless they have to do more. It’s always been this way. They might make more accommodating voluntarily, but they won’t and never have done that. They need to be compelled to do the right thing.
But it’s to their benefit, too!
I mean, your council member can always pass a bylaw requiring bike parking, same way there are often parking minimums.
They won’t. I may circle this back to our active transportation committee to see what they think.
I guarantee business owners would be up in arms. 🙄