Photo by volcanojw
Apartment buildings in the District would be required to provide bike parking to their cycling residents under a set of regulations proposed last week by the D.C. Department of Transportation. The law authorizing the rule has been on the books for several years, but partly because of several years of budget shortfalls, District officials never took action on it until now.
The Bicycle Commuter and Parking Expansion Act became law in late 2007, resulting in the addition of several new bike racks to the John A. Wilson Building. But even though the District could have afforded the cost of then-Mayor Adrian Fenty issuing regulations mandating bike parking inside apartment buildings, that step was left incomplete.
Meanwhile, another of the act’s other key components—commissioning a study on the expansion of municipal bike parking—was deemed too expensive for the District’s coffers then.
DDOT’s proposed rules would require that nearly all buildings with more than eight units provide at least one bicycle parking spot for every three apartments, Washington Business Journal reported Friday. Buildings that would suffer an economic hardship from taking such steps would be exempted from compliance, as would residential structures like assisted-living facilities and homes for the elderly.
The proposed regulations issued last week recommend that bicycle parking be placed inside and no lower than one story below ground. Basements and enclosed parking garages would fit the bill.
The Wilson Building got its bike racks after the 2007 law’s passage, but the rest of the legislation stalled after D.C. Chief Financial Officer Natwar Gandhi reported the relatively small cost of the bike-parking study was too great for the District’s budget to handle.
In a memorandum dated June 22, 2007, Gandhi told then-Council Chairman Vince Gray that District budgets through fiscal year 2011 were not sufficient to afford the $60,000 to $100,000 cost of full implementation. The Wilson Building bike racks were paid for by existing DDOT funds, while the residential bike parking rules were never put forward.
The D.C. Council revisited the issue in late 2010 with the Bicycle Commuter and Parking Expansion Amendment Act, which actually authorized the District to enforce bike-parking standards on residential and commercial buildings.
By then, Gandhi wrote in another memorandum to Gray, who was then preparing to be sworn in as mayor, the District had enough money to implement the full body of the legislation.
And while DDOT has finally issued its rules, enforcement is another matter. Both the 2007 and 2010 laws only authorize—not obligate—the mayor to enforce bike-parking rules. Actually checking buildings and citing violators would require the hiring of additional DDOT inspectors at a cost to D.C. taxpayers of $54,867 each, Gandhi wrote.
