Cycling down Swiss Cottage high street in North London and ticking off various errands as I’ve done so many times before I pondered a question. How hard could it be to get my local council to install some new bicycle parking here? I’m sure lots of London Cyclists have pondered this question. Perhaps, it’s outside your office where you can only find a lamppost to attach your bike to or near your favourite pub in Soho. I’m always annoyed that there is nowhere to secure a bike near Ain’t Nothing But (careful, video automatically plays on this link).

Surely, all the council have to do is; inspect the site, make sure there are no cables running under the ground where the bicycle stand would go and then plonk it in. Hey presto, you’ve got an extra two bicycle parking spaces for years to come at a minimum cost.

With this question occupying my thoughts I hatched a crazy experiment. I want to see how on earth I can get the council to take this seemingly easy piece of action. After all, our councillors are always telling us they work for us. Plus, the experiment is likely to benefit fellow London Cyclist’s who may have identified similar situations where there seems to be a lack of bicycle parking.

Now, I’m not 100% sure how to proceed. If I was in New York all I would have to do is go online and suggest a new location. This facility doesn’t exist in London. So I guess my first point of call is the local council.

The location I’ve identified looks like this:

Which is around about here:

Swiss Cottage high street is generally a car friendly area with little provision for pedestrians or cyclists. As you can see it’s not the most appealing high street in Britain to walk around and crossing to other side involves crossing a busy A road.

The area has provision for car parking at the expense of a quicker bus journey and a safer cycling route:

Above we can also see the last attempt of a new bicycle parking location which is looking rather drab.

The A41 which runs through Swiss Cottage would theoretically be a good place to add a cycle superhighway. However, at the moment this is not being considered.

There is obviously a need for some additional cycle parking as the next nearest racks are some distance away and full. Cyclist are leaving their bikes on other street furniture:

I’ll let you know how my little Swiss Cottage experiment goes. Perhaps it will be quick and easy or perhaps 6 months from now we will still be waiting for a new bike rack.

Got any tips for me or think this is a good / stupid idea – leave a comment!

See also:

• Crowdsourcing bike rack building in NY
• Does your office have these three cyclist facilities?
• Unconventional ways of preventing your bike from being stolen
• What I know about Swiss Cottage

Above is a screenshot of the FixCity.org bike racks website. This allows New Yorkers to submit where they believe a bike rack should be built. The site comes with a good instructional video to show you how to scout out good location. Then, when enough suggestions have been submitted, they send them all in to the government.

The site run by Open Planning Project is currently been trialled in a small part of the city before they look for wider adoption.

I love the combination of using crowd intelligence and bringing it all together in a neatly designed web application. So this begs the question. Where is London’s version?

Thanks my Twitter follower Kcita for spotting FixCity. She is a communications and information designer and her website is here.

My first time was outside my college when I was 16. I remember it well. Everyone remembers their first time. She was beautiful. The most gorgeous mountain bike you have ever seen. Sure it was just a £200 bike from JJB Sports but I was young and I was in love. I looked around at the exact spot where I had left it but it was nowhere to be seen.

I’m sure a lot of people can recall their first time. Now we all know how to lock our bikes but maybe some times in takes more than that. Maybe it takes a little bit of thinking outside the box. A little bit of “blue sky thinking” if you will.

The first way to achieve this enlightened state of mind is to step into the shoes of a criminal. In my criminal heyday I stole a packet of cigarettes and maybe a few sweets from the local shop. The packet of cigarettes was a long time ago and the sweets was last Sunday. I’m kidding, they were both a long time ago. So, I’m not exactly what you may call a criminal mastermind. Yet, despite not been a criminal mastermind this is where I come across my first obstacle to unconventional prevention ideas.

If I was a thief and I liked stealing things what I would not steal is beat up old bikes. Yet, both my bikes that have been stolen were not worth more than £50 second hand. This puts a major dampener on my first unconventional idea: making your bike look ugly.

So if making your bike look undesirable isn’t a guaranteed solution what is?

My second idea is removing parts of your bike when you leave it locked. For example taking off the front wheel and locking it in a separate location? Then Mr Thief comes along, sees a bike with a missing front wheel and thinks: “unless I’m the king of wheelies there’s no way I’m stealing that”.

I don’t think this is such a bad idea. Though of course it is a pain having to find a location to leave my bike and then another location to leave my wheel and then having to rejoin the two. Even with a quick release it still takes time.

Another idea which may work well is to personalise the bike. When research was done into which wallets were returned and which were not they came to an interesting conclusion. Putting a picture of a baby in your wallet greatly improved your chances of being reunited. Perhaps this could also work with bikes. Perhaps I should print a picture of a baby and put it on my bike. I would certainly get some funny looks. Though a funny idea, I would presume a bike that had been heavily personalised would not be as sellable. So maybe you should litter it with stickers? The obvious downside to this is I don’t particularly want to make my bike look silly.

However, this is good, were definitely getting somewhere with our unconventional thinking. Let’s take it to the extreme level.

What if bikes were so cheap there was no point stealing one? What if everyone in the world was automatically given a bike for life as soon as they are born? What if we banned selling of second hand bikes? What if all bikes were fitted with GPS tracking? What if your bike wouldn’t move without finger print identification?

Okay, let’s cut back on the extreme thinking a little. For a start whilst the price of bikes may continue to fall, the most desirable bikes will no doubt remain expensive and thus there will still be a market for them. Banning second hand bike sales would be unworkable and wasteful and GPS tracking would no doubt be expensive. A bike for life could potentially work and would be very interesting.

Throwing these ideas around is a good thought exercise but one day I’m hopeful our bike theft problems may eventually solve themselves. If the number of cyclists continues to increase then maybe one day a bike will become such a commodity that we don’t even think about it. It would be like someone trying to steal your vacuum cleaner.

For now I’ll continue locking my bike with two different locks, in well lit areas, near to other bikes but I just might add a few personal touches.

See also:

• How to lock your bike
• Bicycle insurance

Next there was showers. Not enough of them but none the less they were there. It feels ten times better arriving at work and been able to have a shower before starting. It also meant I could cycle faster without worrying about sweating. Plus the oldest trick in the book was saying hi to my boss so she knew I was there and then heading off to take a shower. What?! I’m in the office so its fine. Don’t look at me like that! Okay I was a bit of a slacker, anyway, you didn’t hear that trick from me.

Finally my office offered lockers. Plenty of them to put my shoes in. They even had big lockers to hang my suit up. Pretty great really.

What I’m really interested to hear from everyone is the following:

• What kind of facilities your office offers?
• If it doesn’t offer any of them then how do you cope without them?
• Have you ever tried to convince your office to add them and was it successful? (They can get £1000 match funding for providing these facilities)
• (If you’re in the UK) Does your office participate in the cycle to work scheme?