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✨New✨ designated bike share parking areas in Ballard!

To help better organize bike share bikes where we’ve seen lots of use in the city, we’re experimenting with designated bike share bike parking areas. We’ve selected five “sidewalk furniture zone” locations along NW Market St in Ballard where we’re encouraging bike share users to park their bike share bikes.

The five designated parking locations have temporary markings and we’ll to determine how effective they are in helping to better organize the brightly colored bikes.

First 5 bike share parking locations:

North side of Market just west of Ballard Ave (in front of Shakti Yoga).

NE corner of Leary and Market (Ballard Beer Company).

SE corner of Leary and Market (AT&T store).

SW corner of Tallman and Market (All the Best Pet Care).

North side of Market just W of Russel (Kangaroo and Kiwi).

For each of these five spots, we identified areas that:

Have space for a 6’x10’ parking area, leaving a full 6’ clear continuous pedestrian path.

Were 3’ back from the curb if adjacent to travel or parking lane.

Are not blocking access to buildings, transit, curb ramps, or loading zones.

Are an area where bike share bikes are often found.

How we’ll measure use.

We’ve monitored these areas for bike parking compliance rates before installation. In the next few weeks, we’ll monitor usage, organization, design resilience, and compliance rates in the immediate vicinity of the locations, on the same block-face, and neighborhood-wide. Data points we will monitor:

The number of bikes in the immediate vicinity of the parking area and how many are parked correctly.

The number of bikes in the neighborhood and how many are parked correctly.

Do the bikes appear more orderly?

How are the markings holding up?

Learn more about our Free-Floating Bike Share Program!

For more info about our bike share program, visit our Free-Floating Bike Share program page. You can also visit our Bike Program page where you’ll find our Bike Map and more helpful info.