Push for pole-less meters has cyclists circling

Old-style parking meters, reviled over the decades by coin-starved drivers, are currently getting plenty of love from bicyclists worried about their possible demise.

In cities nationwide, traditional meters are being replaced by the thousands with multi-space kiosks where drivers pay electronically. Those upgrades have urban cyclists fretting that time is running out on meter poles - the most reliable place to lock up bikes.

Bicycle advocates from Philadelphia to Chicago to Oakland, Calif., are pushing to have defunct meters preserved or converted to specially designed, two-bike racks - before they get pulled up for good. And many cities are listening.

"After all, the U-lock was invented to secure a bike to a parking meter pole," said Robert Raburn, executive director of the East Bay Bike Coalition, which pushed to get meter poles converted to bike racks in Oakland and other California cities.

In Philadelphia, the city and the state-run parking authority plan to replace 7,700 traditional meters in its downtown and University City neighborhoods with about 1,100 multispace kiosks. Bike advocates want to make sure those old meter poles are preserved.

"It seems like it's an opportunity not to be wasted," said Sarah Clark Stuart, an advocate with the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia. "It would be a real step backward to lose them."

Philadelphia officials have been receptive to bicyclists' concerns. In the mayor's office of transportation, an intern has been sent around the city to survey which meters are most frequently used by bicyclists, said Andrew Stober, director of strategic initiatives.

"There is a pretty clear best practice: Don't tear out your meter poles," Stober said.

Some cities have simply kept some defunct meters in place for bikers. Others have converted them to two bike racks by putting a metal ring on the poles, allowing for two bikes to be locked to each meter; that costs about $150 plus installation for each rack.

In Chicago, a city where bicycle commuting is popular and 3 percent of daily trips are taken by bicycle, advocates have persuaded the city to leave one out of every six of the traditional parking meters - about 4,000 in total - to be used for bike parking.

That city has been removing meters since earlier this year and is trying to determine what it will do to convert the old meters to racks; right now, many are covered with green canvas bags denoting them as bike parking.

Rob Sadowsky, of the bicycle advocacy group Active Transportation Alliance, said it was sometimes difficult to get through to Chicago officials about the unintended but painful consequence of meter modernization.

"Boy, if I could just climb up to the top of the mountain, if we had a mountain in Chicago, and scream," he said. "We reached out to the city and said, 'The bicycling community is really angry.'"

Even though cities such as Philadelphia, Chicago and others have added bicycle racks by the thousands, cyclists say they are never as ubiquitous and convenient as meter poles.

That's part of why even smaller cities like Arlington, Va., Buffalo, N.Y., and Sacramento, Calif., have responded to the voices of cyclists and preserved many of the old poles as they modernized meter parking.

In Oakland, where about 5,000 meters have been removed, the city promised to preserve a minimum of two meter posts per block face. That's important, Raburn said, so there is always bike parking close to stores and other downtown locations.

"A bicyclist is unlikely to walk a full block to park their bike if they are just walking in a storefront," he said.

But not all cities are anxious to preserve old parking meters.

New York has about 6,800 bike racks and plans to add another 5,000 over the next three years - in addition to adding 200 miles of bike lanes.

But over the past several years, the city has removed about 10,000 meters - and advocates bemoan the fact that the city doesn't seem anxious to keep or convert the old meter poles.

"We think it's a big missed opportunity. The shortage of on-street bike parking is very pronounced in New York," said Wiley Norvell, a spokesman for Transportation Alternatives, an advocacy group. "Basically, the line from the city has been 'The ship sailed on that.'"

Nicole Garcia, a New York City Department of Transportation spokeswoman, said the agency is mainly focusing on adding bike racks in areas near where meters are being replaced - with more than 1,300 new racks last year and more than 900 so far in 2009.

But officials in Philadelphia and other cities say it's worth trying to keep or convert meters: It will likely come down to a matter of cost and how many meters can be preserved.

"This is about recycling an existing asset," Stober said.