In Los Angeles, it’s illegal to lock your bike to a parking meter. It’s probably illegal in a lot of places, because how do parkers use a meter if it’s covered with bikes? According to scpr.org, meters in LA’s Westwood Village neighborhood are functioning as overflow for UCLA students who need a place to lock their bikes.
Westwood Village, a prime biking area, sees thousands of students and UCLA employees cycling through the neighborhood to campus every day. However, the commercial district adjacent to the university only has about 65 legal bike stand spaces.
I support the practice of making it easy for people to use a bikes as their primary transportation, so it seems like the university and the surrounding areas could install more bike racks. Make it more convenient to ride and maybe you could ease a little traffic congestion while you’re at it. Better still, implement a “bike valet” stand or reserved bike racks for a moderate price. But that’s not the route the city is going to take.
Now the city is weighing a plan to install small, circular hitches onto 150 parking meters in Westwood, which would make securing a bike both easier and legal.
It makes perfect sense for the bikes, who need a place to lock their bikes, and for the city, which needs a cheap solution, but how about the meter’s intended users? I’m not sure they are going to like clambering over two or three bikes to feed the meter. I think this is o ne of those solutions that’s going to create another problem.
Read the article here.
