We already know building bike racks increases the value of properties, we also know there is a big problem with bike parking in London and we now know that people from NYC are getting ahead of London!
Above is a screenshot of the FixCity.org bike racks website. This allows New Yorkers to submit where they believe a bike rack should be built. The site comes with a good instructional video to show you how to scout out good location. Then, when enough suggestions have been submitted, they send them all in to the government.
The site run by Open Planning Project is currently been trialled in a small part of the city before they look for wider adoption.
I love the combination of using crowd intelligence and bringing it all together in a neatly designed web application. So this begs the question. Where is London’s version?
Thanks my Twitter follower Kcita for spotting FixCity. She is a communications and information designer and her website is here.
This is very cool – but it needs to be mobile. if i was out looking for a parking spot, i’d want to be able to use a smartphone for taking a picture of where i think one should be, and it should automatically plot it against GPS coords and register it. I just wouldn’t remember/be as motivated by the time i’d got back to a desktop/laptop.
Ditto for pothole marking!
I think the guys behind the project are looking to expand it to other things such as potholes etc. Or even suggesting new bike lanes I presume? Weird to see citizens taking on the city planning departments job!
I think the mobile suggestion is a good one – definitely for tagging the place etc
I totally agree – it’s endlessly frustrating going to an unfamiliar area and not knowing where the nearest bike rack will be! A website called openstreetmap.org allows you to edit and (I think) share maps – its increasingly being used to crowdsource the mapping of slum areas, and things like that, but it has a feature for adding locations of cycle racks, and the number of spaces available. (Search Earlsfield Station in London for an example.) If this was hosted on a website similar to the NY one, it’d be pretty easy to start building up a picture of where there are racks (or not!). In the meantime it’s surely worth adding any racks people might know about in general too?