It’s Bike to Work Day! Where do you Park?
Today is National Bike to Work Day, and Twitter has seen a constant flow of comments, lively and banal, on the subject. Here’s a sampling:
“Missed Bike to Work day... took the car even... I suck.”
“First bike to work of the year nearly killed me. So out of shape.”
“I tried, but I was not able to get (my bike) up the steps to my office.”
That last comment made me wonder where people put their bikes when they use them to commute. Bike parking was not something I worried much about in my cycling days. I would lean my bike against, and lock it to, a slender tree or a street sign and leave it at that.
But the movement to encourage cycling commutes has raised the issue. I blogged about an event in Santa Monica that offered “valet parking” for people who rode their bikes there. This blog post bemoans the shortage of bike parking in Pasadena.
A shortage of bike parking??
I called Stephan Vance, a regional planner at SANDAG, who focuses on San Diego's “active transportation.” That’s biking and walking, in case you wondered. He told me he knows of no municipal ordinances that prohibit the parking of bikes on city sidewalks. In his experience he’s only seen one no-bike-parking sign. It was at a trolley station.
My sources in the City of San Diego’s Transportation and Storm Water Department (I love bureaucracies!) tell me bikes can be illegally parked. But you can’t give a bike a ticket because bikes are not required to be registered. There would be no way to enforce or follow up on a bike ticket.
“But if a bike is blocking the public right of way, or disability access, it can be removed by the city,” said Bill Harris, a spokesman for the T&SW department.
He said bike corrals are planned for the North Park and Adams Avenue corridors, as part of San Diego's bicycle master plan. A bike corral is a parking space crowded with bike racks where you can store up to ten bikes.
If you ride a bike a lot, leave a comment below and let me know what you do with your bike to keep it safe and pretty much out of the way.
Industry says Oil Prices will stay High
The price of gas has been edging downward in recent weeks and the same has been true for the price of crude oil. But oil company executives say the high price of crude oil is not going away, and they expect it to spike later this year.
A poll of oil company managers, done by the KPMG Global Energy Institute, said the industry expects oil prices to peak between $121 and $130 a barrel before the end of 2011. Right now, oil is just below $100 a barrel.
The price of a gallon of gasoline in San Diego now is $4.17. But don't be surprised if that goes up.
For Sale: Home with Two Bedrooms, One Office
Telecommuting has become such a way of life in New York that realtors are catering to people who work out of their homes. This story in the NY Times says real estate ads are using the word “office” to describe rooms that would earlier have been called another bedroom.
It seems there are only so many bedrooms single and childless people need. So… call it an office and it will attract a few more buyers and be sold for a few more dollars.
