I’m having a litter of cows.

When people drive out of downtown to areas of the city with vertical traffic signals, they will think they have traveled to another city….

Really pleased to hear that the Urban Neighbors/Downtown OKC bike racks from the Rack Up Downtown! neighborhood improvement project for eastern downtown will be included. The looped racks were designed and built locally and have been well received. The design is unique to Oklahoma City and their protective coating is far superior to “off the shelf” racks.

Steve, I couldn’t care less whether traffic lights are vertical or horizontal, but would be interested to hear why Anthony is so emphatic that they should be horizontal. Can you ask and post the answer when you get a chance?

Unrelated to the lights but related to the picture posted: love the curb extensions and the setback parking spaces, but doesn’t the big radius in the crosswalk go against the advice given by Jeff Speck to avoid such things? His position was that, while doing so makes it easier for cars to turn corners and get around, it effectively and dramatically increases the distance a pedestrian must walk to get across the intersection, negatively impacting walkabiltiy.

Mark I’m curious. What type of protection coating is being used on the bike racks and how is the coating superior to what you would find on off the shelf racks?

If Mark doesn’t make it back I can answer that, since I walk by them every day. They have a coating similar to Rhino Liner spray-in truck liners. The brilliance of this is two-fold; they are more rugged than painted or even powder-coated racks, AND they are less likely to scratch a bicycle.

Urban Neighbors really did a fantastic job on designing them. Although personally, I think the location on some could be improved (people are far less likely to utilize racks out on a street corner or a few feet from the street than those nestled safely next to a building, and that shows in the usage since installation), but overall that project was a real credit to UN.

Thanks James for your question and thanks Chad for answering it perfectly.

The key thing is that the Rhino Liner (which is exactly what it is with its attendant rugged, highly robust specs) has a small but important amount of “give” that really limits scratching on both the bike and the rack. With bikes easily costing well north of a grand you really want to make every effort to ensure a cyclist is happy using the rack.

As regards the locations, I don’t deny at all that some of our locations are less than ideal or perhaps “overbuilt” at this point in time before more bike trails and mass transit options are built out. Indeed, right now some of the locations are more effective for district branding and public awareness of cycling – which were always also goals of our project.

I will say though that it was a hell of a struggle to find locations in eastern downtown that met all the location parameters we had to deal with – more details about all this are at http://www.urbanneighbors.org/Websites/urbanneighbors/Images/RackUp_Downtown_ACOG_Presentation_6-18-2008.pdf.

Finally, Project 180 is going to be an excellent opportunity to install racks in ideal locations from the get go, rather than trying to shoehorn them into less than ideal locations. It’s not just a matter of selecting a fancy design from some catalog or national supplier and sticking it somewhere that looks nice on a rendering but more importantly it’s about locating racks in sites that cyclists will want to use.

Keep up the coverage, Steve!

Hope this helps….