it’s not a joke, the name is a bit unfortunate but the facility is amazing. Go to Sao Paulo and see.

Best, Jonas

The thing to note about the second system for our purposes is that in several locations large spaces were added in existing stations in anticipation of connecting routes being added later. Unfortunately these tend not to be at the end of the line, but those stations are pretty big anyway.

In addition to Gecko’s fantastic suggestion of placing bike hubs at the major subway stations, wouldn’t it also be great to have such facilities at major commuter rail stations in Jersey and Long Island? Bike infrastructure should be part of the suburban overhaul Thomas Suozzi and others keep talking about out in Nassau county.

Brazil is a country that before reforming President Lula Da Silva was like a New York State nightmare. Based on “progressive” ideas there were all these rights to “free” everything, and high taxes to pay for them. But all the “free” everything was only available to middle class and affluent people “in the system,” with most of the poor out of it.

One example was water. Water should be “free.” But with no revenues and most tax dollars going to public employee pensions for early retirement, there were no revenues to expand the system which “as luck would have it” only served the better off neighborhoods. Meanwhile, the poor ended buying black market water with low quality at high prices in the shanytowns.

Sounds like parking placards or the NYC schools, doesn’t it?

Da Silva came into offices promising that even the poorest should be able to eat three meals a day and have basic nutrition. It turns out that this cost a tiny fraction of total social spending, so much of it had been skimmed off.

And now Brazil has a paid for bicycle facility, rather than a non-existing facility that is “free,” under a “left wing” “Socialist” administration.

All you need for something like this is the equivalent of a multi-story parking garage. The capital cost would have to be tax-funded, but the operating cost could be paid for.

For auto parking there are the “stackable” lots all over manhattan that enable efficiencies in auto storage. Surely some variant of this technology could also be used for bicycles, right?

Not a fan of using the MTA’s extra storage for this kind of thing. Not thought it through yet but there should be some tax incentives to boost development of bike parking lots. the subway entrances are too narrow for bicycles to enter/exit cleanly.

Mid century capabilities would likely include design, build, and implement on demand using technologies currently existent but very expensive.

It’s absurd to worry about the costs of bike parking like it would be absurd to think about charging people to walk around in the subway system.

You get,

Shower,secure storage, and bike stand and tools at one place in Tempe AZ.

Yes I am going to be on board just to store my bike. I can take the free bus downtown.

Autocentric city meets Tempe Kickya!

One kind of subsidy would be Stacy’s suggestion of getting the MTA to lend out its little-used IND mezzanines. They’re already converting them to storage; there are a lot less of them than there used to be. But there might be some room at some of the outer stations like 179th Street on the F or Bedford Park Boulevard on the D.

The challenge is figuring out where to put them in the stations so people don’t have to bring their bikes through the turnstiles, and so that bike riders don’t get in the way of people going on foot to the turnstiles.

Square footage of ASCOBIKE:

11,442.036 ft²

We at ITDP made a manual on ASCOBIKE, for implementing similiar facilities. Right now it is only in Portuguese, English coming soon:

http://www.itdp.org/documents/Manual%20ASCOBIKE%20Abril%202009.pdf

Also, another webpage w/additional info on the project:

http://www.itdp.org/index.php/projects/update/the_largest_bike_parking_facility_in_the_americas_brazil/

I would like to thank Elizabeth of Streetfilms for doing such a great job on the video, and of course ASCOBIKE for existing. We hope to help multiply these facilities throughout Brazil and elsewhere.

Best, Jonas

The places with the huge mezzanines are stations built as part of the IND in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The IND was generally over-built, often in anticipation of a “second system” to come.

IND lines are the 8th Avenue, 6th Avenue, Smith/9th (F to Church), Fulton, Queens Boulevard, Concourse, and Crosstown (G).