Valet bike parking at PGE park
Posted by: MichelleJul 30 2007, 12:15 pm
For the past four months, since I spent a day with the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition (SFBC) investigating their valet bike parking service, I've been chewing on plans for next year's event bike parking. I'll go more into my plans later, but here's a great target client: PGE Park.
Recently I've been hearing about bike thefts at PGE Park. And certainly whenever I go, bikes are just haphazardly locked to anything vertical and permanent, creating a choatic street scene and blocking the sidewalk, and not very secure. There used to be a bank of on-street bike parking across Morrison from the stadium (Portland's first on-street bike parking, actually) but it was taken out for construction of the Civic (a Gerding/Edlen condo project) on Burnside.
SFBC parks bikes at more than 70 events every year. And this is VALET bike parking - not the lock-it-yourself-to-an-A-frame-barricade kind of bike parking we've gotten accustomed to in Portland. This is hand-over-your-bike-with-all-its-accessories-still-attached-and-walk-away kind of bike parking. They charge event promoters for it, sure, but event promoters know how much value it adds to their events, so they pay. And it's free to bicyclists. And of course helps reduce auto traffic around major urban events.
SFBC may sell its bike parking service to events for those reasons, but large events (more than 2,000 attendees) are also required, by city ordinance, to provide secure bike parking. (Portland doesn't have such an ordinance. Yet.) They can provide it themselves, or they can subcontract with SFBC.
In addition to these events, SFBC runs valet bike parking for Giants games, and they have a special storage room set aside for it. Check out this awesome film about it.
What is your experience using your bike to get to PGE Park? Any thoughts about how to pitch them on the idea of valet bike parking next year? Or should we just ask the city, Gerding/Edlen and/or PGE Park to replace the bank of blue staple racks that use to serve us?
When I attend a game, I always bike. It's such a mess (at least at Timbers games), with so many bikes and not nearly enough spots. I don't understand why they allowed the new Civic building to remove our on-street spots and not replace them.
I'd love valet service.
Aug 01 2007 at 9:37 am