Thursday, June 5, 2008

Racking Spokane


There is movement afoot: real movement towards putting some bike racks downtown.

As usual with Good Bike Things That Happen in Spokane, there's a bunch of people working angles and pulling strings and generally doing stuff behind the scenes:
  • Former BAB member Kimberly: initiated a bike rack study for downtown (how many, where are they, where should new ones go.)

  • Current BAB member Cindy: collaborated with EWU to get Kim's study implemented by EWU planning students.

  • SpokeFest'ers: connecting with DSP and throwing in some money.

  • Andrew with DSP: finding a local vendor to produce the rack; working with the city code enforcment to understand placement; rounding up some seed money to install initial set of racks

  • EWU Planning student Beth: figuring out where the first half-dozen or so racks should go.

  • Jon at Out There: providing print ad discounts for businesses that install bike racks

I'm sure I've missed some people in this list.

This looks promising. Hopefully we'll see some racks going in downtown in the next few months.
Once the process and rules and regulations are figured out, hopefully we can get page up on the city web site or the BAB site that explains the hows and ways of putting a rack in front of your business or store.

Other rack news:

  • Plum Tree school is getting a super fancy rack/bike leaner built by local artist and eco-geek, Hazen Audel, in the next month or so.


  • The Spokane Indian's ball park is installing a super sweet bike rack that is made from recycled steel tubing that came out of the grandstands during the off season refurbishing. The rack will be sponsored by Wheel Sport.

2 comments:

bleckb said...

I was downtown yesterday and noticed that the condo across from Riverpark Square on Main, next to PF Chang's, has a rack out front, but it's like an abbreviation of your favorite. It's something of an inverted 'U' with no crossbar. I guess it's better than nothing, though it's just hanging out there on the sidewalk. The bad news, sorta, is that the condo entryway has a "no bikes in lobby" sign. Booo!

Locke said...

I stumbled onto this site today and thought of this post.

Ballard is having a Rack Design contest.

What a cool idea