Tidbit Tuesday | Breakdown of Bicycle Parking Spaces in Center City

January 20, 2015 by motuphila215

On Tuesdays, the Mayor’s Office of Transportation & Utilities (MOTU) posts a map or graphic that tells a story about transportation or utilities in the City of Brotherly Love.

Did you know that Center City Philadelphia is home to more than 5,000 bicycle parking spaces? This week we graphed data describing bicycle parking in Center City which is available on OpenDataPhilly here. We graphed the percentage of bicycle parking spaces available in Center City by the type of bicycle parking (we only included formal bicycle parking, a structure whose purpose is only for bicycle parking, and did not include informal bicycle parking, a structure whose initial purpose is for something other than bicycle parking, such as a sign post). For a more detailed understanding of the different types of bicycle parking available in Center City in this data set, please check out the data’s metadata located here.

As can be seen in the graph, 50% of all bicycle parking spaces in Center City are made available through staple racks (sometimes known as inverted u-racks). In addition, converted parking meters make up an additional 32% of all bicycle parking spaces. School yard racks, wave racks, and on-street corrals make up the remaining 18%. We did not include hitchpost style bicycle parking and miscellaneous bicycle parking (examples of which can be seen here), as both provide too few bicycle parking spaces in Center City to be able to be seen on this chart. That being said, we did include the total bicycle parking spaces provided by these structures in our overall counts.

Please note that breakdown is the percent of the number of parking spaces available, not by the total number of bicycle parking structures are available. A quick summary of the data is as follows:

Total Number of Bike Parking Spaces Converted Parking Meter 1,640 32% Hitch Style 12 0% Other 8 0% School Yard 630 12% Staple or Inverted-U 2,612 50% Street Corral 110 2% Wave 210 4% Total 5,222 100.0%

What is your favorite type of bicycle parking?