06 March 2011

Exciting Development

There is a free newspaper, The Boston Courant, which is delivered to our apartment regularly, maybe weekly? I don't read it much, but this week a headline caught my eye:

Space for Bikes Not Cars at New Building

It seems there is a new residential development in the former Renaissance School building. It appears this is right downtown, near the Public Garden and Back Bay.

I don't know if the bike parking will be sufficient or not. The article states that they have 767 square feet of storage for up to 80 bicycles. The building will have 128 units, broken out as 76 two bedrooms, 29 one bedrooms, and 23 studios. Certainly that's less than one bike per unit, so my family would have trouble taking only our fair share. Of course we could keep doing what we're doing - parking some bikes in the apartment itself. In any case it would be fun to live in such a bike focused building.

I wonder if they'll release photos of the bike storage design? I'd love to see how they have it set up!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

It it's a "common" bike room, you might as well just leave your bike unlocked on the street.

Anything less than secure individual bike lockers is an invitation to theft. Just as the lion looks at the herd and sees all the wildebeests, the thief knows that the bike room is easy pickings!

Anonymous said...

This is just great... here's hoping this is the beginning of a trend in new residential design.

Charlotte said...

Anonymous 2:29 - That's not true. If you leave your bike unlocked in a common bike room then you're inviting it to disappear, but I don't think most people would be that naive.
Certainly there is a list of reasons why locked inside is better than locked outside.

cycler said...

That's interesting.
I know that Nicole Freedman is working on zoning changes to mandate bike parking minimums in new construction.
A sticking point on a lot of projects, and a concern for opponents of Sprawl is that a lot of zoning codes require MINIMUM car parking ratios, which either limit the number of units, or create larger than needed parking areas, just to meet the code. Cambridge can be pretty flexible about this, but I don't know how the process in Boston works.