BIKEPGH MESSAGE BOARD ARCHIVE

Mildly spammy, but a worthy topic we haven't talked about much. For me right now, also timely, as I work in a large building with inadequate bike parking.

Until a couple months ago, I worked in a building which featured parking for several dozen bikes in its underground garage. No moving parts. Just a big peg jutting horizontally, which you hung your bike on. Adjacent pegs were offset vertically to avoid clash of handlebars. I don't recall the brand name, though may have a photo somewhere.

The bike is locked with a locking bar. The bottom racks of our double decker bike racks can move horizontally. When you want to store a bike on the rack, just push the bikes on the bottom racks aside to provide more space for the bike to be stored.

The customer site where you want to sell one of these is U.S. Steel Tower, 600 Grant Street, Pittsburgh. It's a 62-story building with an underground parking garage. It has spaces for fewer than 30 bikes; thousands of people work in this building. Note: You cannot bike in or out of the place. Bikes have to use the handicapped door and access the parking areas via an elevator.

Do you mean that we should build an automatic underground bike parking garage? Its price is very high because we need to set an automatic control system to deliver the bikes to the parking areas. If you want to store only 30 bikes, the project budget will exceed your estimate. If the users can access the parking areas to store or retrieve the bikes directly, I think we can help you. What's the size of parking area?

I can't give you much advice here beyond what I already did. This is the largest office building in Pittsburgh, at one time was the tallest building between NYC and Chicago. Right now, there are only about 30 hooks to place a bike, and space for about 15 outside. For a building with a potential population of about 6,000 people. Howzbout if you want to make a sale in Pittsburgh, you come here and do some footwork. I still see you as a spammer, but it does look like you have a potentially useful product, and I've identified a site with a serious need. Steel Building has a three-level underground parking garage, labeled Green, Blue and Red. Green and Red have a few hooks each; Blue has nothing. It's an odd-shaped garage, roughly built on a spiral, underneath a triangular building. There are lots of odd little spots where you could install a rack of some sort, at the loss of a couple of parking spaces. On the Blue level, near the South elevator, is a narrow spot currently set up for two parking spaces, so about 20 feet long by 15 feet wide by about 10 feet high. I'll see if I can get a photo. It's my best guess for where you could put one of your structures. But the biggest problem with this site is that every bike has to be walked in at street level into the lobby through the handicapped door, then use a narrow elevator to get down to the parking garage, one at a time. There is no other way. You cannot bike in or out. So this may not work at all -- not your solution, not anyone's solution. In 1968 when they designed this building, the only acceptable forms of travel were foot and car. Bikes didn't exist. And I really don't see changing anything. Beyond that, I have no pull here; I can't even tell you who you would need to talk to. As I said, do your research. Second sales possibility: One of the Interpark parking garages. This company is outright hostile to bicycle parking. Just plain nasty. You want to make a sale, there's a tough nut to crack. Their office is in the garage on Cherry Way by Fourth Avenue. Rotsa ruck. There might be more spots in Pittsburgh. It's a very dense downtown, not much space for parking. We cyclists don't much care what shape the parking structure is, so long as it works. If you can convince any parking garage people to give up two or three paid spaces so that a couple dozen cyclists can park there instead, and pay you a few thousand dollars for the privilege, more power to you.

http://600grantstreet.com

There is your contact info. Go to the main page and you'll see how proud they are for supplying two dozen racks, almost half of them out in the weather, righunder Recent News. If you think you can make a sale here, more power to you.