There are roughly 3 million parking spaces on New York City streets, most of which can be used by drivers for free. One New York-based startup wants to repurpose some of them for storing bikes, not cars.
Curbsides weren’t always dominated by cars in New York; until 1950, cars weren’t allowed to be parked overnight in Manhattan. Today, though many drivers still feel entitled to the curbside space, there’s a move to shift some of it to other uses. Some parking spaces have been taken away for bike lanes or bus lanes. During the pandemic, other parking spaces were given to restaurants for curbside dining. Some people have advocated for eliminating free street parking completely.
Some city governments invest far more in bike parking—take the example of the Dutch city of Utrecht, where a parking garage solely for cyclists has more than 12,000 spots, along with on-site bike repair and rental and a design that leads directly to the adjacent train station. Stuart says it’s clear that American cities should invest more in infrastructure, but startups can also play a role in solving the problem.
The company sells advertising space on its larger pods, the first two of which are located at the Atlantic Terminal in Brooklyn and at a train station in Jersey City where riders commute into Manhattan. The ads support the system so all riders can use it for free, something that Stuart sees as critical. The business also plans to sell other services, such as bike repair. Rather than selling the units to the city, the business deploys and runs them itself.
The company, which is now part of an urban technology startup accelerator called Urban-X, is crowdsourcing suggestions about where to put the first two curbside pods, which will be sponsored by Voi, a European micromobility company. In the first day after the announcement, the company was flooded with requests from people making the case for putting the pods in their own neighborhoods.
Ultimately, Stuart envisions a network of secure bike parking throughout the city. “In order to succeed, micromobility has to be as compelling and as convenient as using the car. People can spend billions and billions of dollars on bikes and bikeshare, but until we get serious about infrastructure, we’re just a community of people who ride bikes for fun. We’re not building an ecosystem that is on par with other modes of transit. We need to start thinking about bikes and scooters and micromobility as transit, as a legitimate piece of transportation.”