If I was to double capacity for car parking at, say, Fortinos on Dundurn, it would take a lot of money, and a hell of a lot of space. We’d be tearing down a neighbourhood in no time.

But for bike parking, it’s so easy. Why is it so easy, you ask? Let me tell you:

Usually there isn’t as much bike parking as car parking, one or two racks vs hundreds of car stalls

Bike racks are often installed wrong, which creates an opportunity…

So yeah, the scale is drastically different when it’s cars or bikes:

Looking down on the Fortinos lot (I’m not picking on them, it’s just they are close to where I live) it’s slightly disturbing to think that all that surface area is to park cars for part of every day. It looks so, so….inefficient. You can’t even see the bike parking.

I measured the bike rack at the plaza: it was 75 inches end to end (I only had a tape measure in inches, sorry), and my bike back wheel stuck out from the rack to a distance of 52 inches.

I should have measured a shopping cart for comparison, but from the Google street view image, the rack isn’t much bigger that a cart.

The bike rack would hold twice as many bikes if the opposite side wasn’t up against a wall. All it would take to double capacity would be moving the rack 90 degrees, perpendicular to the wall.

Using the measure tool on Google maps (I wasn’t going to measure with my tape measure, sorry to disappoint those that would take delight in seeing me crawling over the dirty asphalt!) I know that a single parking space is 17’x8′, or an area of 136 square feet.

A bike rack at half capacity takes up about 27 square feet. Doubling capacity by rotating the rack 90° would come in at 54 square feet.

I’m into the math here, so at full capacity (holding about 12 bikes) 54 square feet is 40% of a single space for ONE CAR!

A properly installed bike rack is at least 12 times more efficient than a car parking space.

Just so you know I’m not taking an isolated incident, here are a couple more shots of similarly installed racks at different locations:

Should I talk to the Fortinos manager about this? What do you think they’ll say? They don’t like efficiency? Doubling capacity for no cost?

Maybe they would take a car space and put two bike racks in it, for a net benefit of 24 times efficiency! (though I like when racks are under an overhang to protect from rain, etc.)