This headline — Bike Parking Lot, With Attendant, Is Planned for Midtown — caught 10 Speed’s eye. It’s from the New York Times, and it made me think about bicycle commuting and parking in St. Louis.

There has been an effort to add bicycle racks around STL in the past few years, but we’ve never seen anything like the $200,000 needed to sponsor the lot in New York City or the $149 yearly fee that cyclists pay to park in Chicago. And unless we get a massive influx of people downtown, or a massive increase to a 1960s-era level of workers downtown, we probably never will.

STL is a great area in which to bicycle, but bicycle commuting is a very small part of the area’s transportation. This is unfortunate, especially now with the Highway 40 shutdown.

Bicycle commuting is not difficult. 10 Speed’s done it — 28 miles roundtrip — and though it adds about an hour and a half overall to the roundtrip (including de-stinkifying upon arrival at work), it’s worth the effort. Your workouts are built into your daily commute, you work off stress, and you learn the traffic patterns and adjust your routes accordingly. 

The St. Louis Regional Bicycle Federation and Trailnet have comprehensive commuting information available online … and it’s FREE!

If enough people re-discover their bikes in the next two years of Highway 40 construction, maybe one day we’ll have the need to shell out $149 a year to park our bikes downtown.

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