Every cyclist has been there: Standing on a street, looking for a rack to secure their steed with nothing in sight but a parking meter. Grrrrrrrrrrrr!

Fixcity.org is changing that by tapping the cycling community to identify prime locations for bike racks. The experiment in crowdsourced cycling infrastructure is run by the Open Planning Project, which is testing it out in Brooklyn's Greenpoint-Williamsburg neighborhood before rolling it out elsewhere in the Big Apple and perhaps beyond.

"We're currently still working to get FixCity working for all of NYC, but would love to expand it to other cities as well,” spokeswoman Lily Bernheimer said.

So how's it work?

Let's say you think there oughtta be a bike rack outside that taqueria down the street. Click Fixcity.org's "Suggest a Rack" link to mark the spot on the map, then upload photos of appropriate locations. The next step is verifying the rack will actually fit in the spot you want it – for example, it's gotta be 15 feet from a crosswalk or bus stop, 8 feet from a fire hydrant and so forth. Verifying your location is a snap because Fixcity provides handy guidelines you can print out (.pdf) and consult while doing recon. Still need help? There's a – video you can watch to walk you through the process.

Although Gotham has seen a big increase in bicycling, a dearth of secure, legal bike parking keeps many from city trekking. Transportation officials running the CityRacks program no longer accept one-off rack requests from the public, making it tough for individuals to take action. But with Fixcity bringing together community organizations and individual riders to suggest and verify locations, the city can accept "bulk orders" for racks spanning several neighborhoods.

More than one hundred rack sites have been suggested to far, and there's a push to get 300 racks mapped out in Brooklyn. FixCity launched earlier this fall and says it can take up to six months for CityRacks to approve and install racks once it gets a bulk order.

Want to launch FixCity in your city? Bernheimer suggests doing some homework first. The first step is ensuring the requirements for bike rack placement in your town are the same as those in New York. Then you've got to figure out how racks are installed in your city, whether there's already a mechanism for suggesting rack locations. A local variation of FixCity would have to be adapted to suit your city's regs

Thanks to reader Andreas K. for the tip.

Photo: Flickr / Tom Simpson