Seattle is adding hundreds of bike racks around the city, some of which will be placed in Ballard and Fremont.
As SDOT’s Joel Miller told MyNorthwest, the city will increase the bike rack capacity by 20 precent, which means roughly 800 new racks around Seattle, paid for by fees charged to bike-share companies.
According to city guidelines, each of the three bike-share companies in Seattle — Lime, Uber, and Lyft — are allowed to have 6,666 bikes on the street, and must pay the city $50 per bike in operation. Of that, about 40 percent will go to pay for the new bike racks.
The racks will be strategically placed with bike-share in mind: most of the racks will be placed near transit stations, and busy bus stops. :”And also in the urban villages and centers where we see a lot of use …. the University District, Ballard and Fremont area, definitely downtown and Pioneer Square. Those are some of the urban villages we saw a lot of use in the (bikeshare) pilot,” Miller told MyNorthwest.
The new racks will be intended for all bikes, with an emphasis on discouraging poorly parked bike-shares.
Photo from Seattle.gov