Upsurge in bikers means more bike rooms in NYC

Suman Sridhar | May 15, 2013

Buildings often have a room to hang your coat, but how about a room to store your bike? Since it’s National Bike to Work Week, bikes are definitely on everyone’s brain. It’s no secret that bikes are great for fitness and weight loss, and it’s expensive and exasperating to have them stolen. Thanks to new initiatives such as bike share programs, city dwellers can choose bicycles as alternative transportation more easily than ever.

The famous bike room at the Empire State building

New York is a city chock full of bicycle commuters, and the city has seen an increase in bicycle rooms in buildings for cyclists to store their bikes. Bike rooms are springing up all over Manhattan. Bike rooms are ideal places for commuters to drop off their bikes when they head to work or run errands; cyclists don’t have to worry about leaving their bikes exposed to weather or theft.

One famous bike room is near northern TriBeca, where unused storage space off Charlton Street, adjacent to a loading dock, was converted into a bike storage room. It typically holds 35 or 40 bicycles a day. Other locations include the Avenue of the Americas, Madison Avenue, and even the Empire State Building. That particular bike room is 780 square feet of retail space.

Installing a bike room is becoming a popular way for landlords to attract new tenants or increase their income by renting the space to local bike commuters. It’s also a green-friendly initiative; bike rooms are positive contributions to the environment and help improve public perception of a business.

So what stops a lot of buildings with bike rooms from getting LEED certified (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) to officially verify that they are ‘green’ buildings? The U.S. Green Building Council only awards LEED compliance to organizations with bike rooms that have showers and changing rooms. For many landlords, these are costly, overly spacious, and unnecessary for those who commute short distances. However, the LEED certification is coveted because it is considered trustworthy. Therefore, the prevalence of bike rooms depends on a landlord’s willingness to spend extra leasing funds on the additional space and shower rooms.

In a New York Times article, Transportation Alternative director Noah Budnick says, “The law just requires that the buildings let the people get their bikes from the street to the office. They’re both good solutions…We’re hearing more and more that this is a selling point for the real estate industry. You’re seeing office spaces marketed with bike rooms, which is pretty awesome.”

How to properly lock the bike

Whether bikers work in buildings that have bike rooms or not, it is absolutely necessary to lock up their bikes. Some tips for locking up your bike include: buying a cable and a u-lock, and positioning your bike frame and wheels so that you take up as much of the open space between the lock and the bike as possible.

The advent of bike rooms will help cycling stay at the forefront of people’s minds. Cycling rooms provide safety and convenience for cyclers, and will help cement biking as a regular part of people’s lives. Hopefully New York will not be the only city that sees an upswing in the availability of bike rooms.

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