New bike stands spotted

For those of us year-round bike riders, one of the things that makes me smile is, despite the traffic, I’ll never have to look for parking. Locking to a parking meter gives me more joy, and especially when a harried 9-to-5er comes out to feed it while I’m locking up.

Well, the City of Montreal is making it easier to lock your bike to parking meters. A number of steel rings have been attached to parking meter poles in the city. The ones I’ve seen are on Berri, along the east side of the Bibliotheque Nationale. When I heard about the design I was skeptical – the description sounded like the ring and post bike stands in Toronto with the rings that are prone to being pried right off. But the designers have come up with something that is simple, functional and attractive, and seems to avoid the Toronto problem.

From what I can tell, there are many advantages to this new bike stand.
• If you have a chain lock, running it through the ring prevents thieves from lifting your bike up and over the top.
• The ring makes it easier to lock a bike on each side of the pole.
• If your bikes is a standard size, the ring is at the right height to facilitate locking up both the wheel and frame
• The ring goes right around the pole, so it can’t be pried off.
• These bike stands won’t be hauled away for the winter

The disadvantages:
• From what I’ve seen a lot of people don’t “get” the new locking system and are still just locking to the parking pole itself, or not locking up their front wheel.
• BMX and low-riders are too low for these stands.

The one other criticism is not so much about the stand itself, but about the City’s rhetoric surrounding them. They’re saying these rings are creating 2,000 new bicycle parking spots. I will point out that the need for these rings is a direct result of the City changing its parking meter system and putting plastic protectors around the poles, making some of them too fat to take a u-lock. I am, however, happy to see a workable solution.