New thoughts on NYC bike racks

Last night I was down by Astor Place so I finally got to see the finalists' bike rack designs in person. I don't have any new pictures to share, but after seeing them up close, I've revised my thoughts about some of them.

First of all, I ruled out all of the entries which featured a colored powdercoat finish. Including the Lang/Dobbs yellow Y-rack which I previously chose as my favorite design. The reason is simple - these racks have only been up for a week or so and they already look like hell with the paint scratched up terribly.

I still like the Y-rack as a design on paper, but in the real world it would function much better without a painted finish, and that would compromise part of it's appeal. Some people are also saying that skateboarders will be all over that thing, but I reject that arguement. No one's going to skate on it when bikes are locked to it, and if there are no bikes, who cares if some kids are skating on it or a pedestrian uses it as a seat?

Besides being powdercoated, the Open Thread 4-bike rack is simply way too big.

The flexible cable rack by Next Phase Studios is not as bad as I thought it was (not too flexible), but it still seems like a gimmick and is likely to create unnecessary production costs.

I still really like the Ignacio Ciocchini circle rack with the vertical green stripe. Even though this rack has some green powdercoat, it's not painted on the circular part of the rack, which is the primary bicycle contact point. To me, this design simply provides all of the necessary functionality while fitting in best with existing NYC street furniture.

I've substantially improved my view of the Jeff Miller & Andrea Ruggiero diamond shaped rack. This thing is DURABLE. It looks good in person. And I like the green plastic strip which protects both the rack and your bike. This could easily be my top choice, but I still like the look of the Ciocchini rack better.

After eliminating all the powdercoating and the gimmicks, the Ian Mahaffy & Maarten De Greeve circle rack gets elevated to third place, in my opinion. Any of the other racks which I have not mentioned, my opinion has not substantially changed from my previous post.

So, these are my new top 3 picks:

1. Ciocchini - circle rack w/green stripe
2. Miller/Ruggiero - cast iron w/protective plastic
3. Mahaffy/De Greeve - circle w/horizontal crossbar

NYC - New Bike Rack design finalists

EDIT: After seeing the racks in person, I've posted my revised thoughts on the finalists and have updated my top 3 picks. Follow this link to read my updates.

The 10 finalists in NYC's CityRacks bike rack design competition are on view at Astor Place. I haven't had a chance to see them in person yet, but as an artist and a cyclist I figure I'm qualified to offer my $0.02 on the designs.

Below is an image of each rack, followed by my commentary. Be sure to check out the excerpts from the designers' original submissions on the CityRack design website.


Andrew Lang and Harry Dobbs
This is my favorite of the 10 finalists. I think the standard inverted "U" rack is already a pretty good design, and this basically improved upon it with 2 important features:

First, although it can still only accommodate two bikes at a time, it is wider than the inverted "U" so that any type of bike can be locked in a variety of places. This also allows for easily securing the frame and the wheels and prevents the bike from falling over while locked up.

Second, the rack is designed from rectangular triangular tubing which forms a closed loop instead of open ended pipe. This makes the rack more resistant to being broken and if it were somehow knocked out of the ground, the bike still could not be removed because of the closed loop.

Also, it's a nice touch that it can be powder-coated in a variety of colors and inserted into the I *heart* NY logo.


Baroni Valeriani architetti
This rack sucks so bad that the cyclist preferred to lock up to a sign post. If you lock up to this rack, you can expect to come back only to find everything gone but your wheel, since it's not tall enough to lock up the frame. Pedestrians will probably trip over this thing also.


Ian Mahaffy and Maarten De Greeve
Functionally, this is not bad. The horizontal cross bar prevents your lock from sliding down to the ground where it is more vulnerable to attack. However, the single point of contact with the ground looks weak. Also, it doesn't really look like it fits in with NYC street furniture -- too sleek and round. Perhaps a different color or patina would help. I like this brown, rusty look better.


Federico Otero
This rack looks like it could do the job. And you could probably squeeze 3 bikes on this rack, unlike the others so far, which can only handle 2 bikes. My only complaint would be the round tubing could be vulnerable to pipe cutters, but this design wouldn't look as good made from a rectangular bar. Maybe it's a bit too boring?


Francis Anthony Bitonti (FADarch)
WTF is this crap? Is that a bike rack or a model for some generic public sculpture? Besides being ugly, it looks like it could be difficult or impossible to use a U-lock with this rack. Also, apparently this particular rack is no longer on display -- according to a comment I read on Gothamist, that's because it was made out of some sort of foam and it broke. Booo!


Ignacio Ciocchini
This rack looks like it belongs on a NYC street. Something about the green paint and the bare metal reminds me of the scaffolding structures that are constantly set up over the sidewalks. But it's much better to lock your bike to this than to scaffolding. I like it -- thumbs up.


Jeff Miller & Andrea Ruggiero
This rack appears to be made out of plastic. PLASTIC. I don't care what it looks like or how "high-density polypro" they claim it is, I'm not locking my bike up to a plastic rack.
CORRECTION: Apparently I was wrong. This rack is cast iron, not plastic. The green part is plastic, attached to the iron rack. I'm still not a big fan of the design, but this makes it MUCH better than I originally thought, and now my primary objection is aesthetics. It looks too much like those free newspaper dispensers cluttering the sidewalk.

Also, the version of this rack in the original proposal has space for advertising, and we don't need any more damn advertisments.


Next Phase Studios
This rack is made of a thick, flexible, metal cable. Not as bad as plastic, I suppose, but WHY? Next...


Stephan Jaklitsch Architects PC
This is an OK design, but really not that exciting visually. There might be some trouble with getting a U-lock around the thicker sections of the lower portion of the rack. Once again, I like the green color (seems appropriate for NYC), but I like that this design allows for different colors and bare aluminum.


Open Thread Design
Besides the Andrew Lang/Harry Dobbs design which I already stated was my favorite, this is the only other rack that I'm strongly in favor of. In addition to the sturdy rectangular barstock, the main advantage of this rack is that it can easily accommodate 4 bikes, more than any of the other racks in the competition. That's probably also it's biggest disadvantage -- this rack takes up way too much space to be used throughout the city. But that may not be such a big problem, since the Open Thread Design team also came up with a 2 bike version that can also function as sign post.

Maybe we can have 2 winners?

Trying to Imagine

I think my imagination is broken. I've been suffering from a creative block for a while, and it's gotten worse since my sewing machine broke. I was planning on using it a lot during my break, but now that that's not happening I've been forced to confront a nearly empty studio without much of an alternate plan. These past few days have not been very fruitful. I've been doing a lot of reading and thinking, but barely any making. Trying to stay positive, I keep telling myself that I'm just going through some necessary mental process before I can start making stuff, but I'm beginning to think I need to just buckle down and start doing, even if I'm not totally into it or it results in bad art. After all, you can't really fail if you don't have a goal...maybe it will lead to something good.

But after a few unproductive days in the studio, I couldn't stand the idea of going back there today. I felt the need to head out into the city on my bike with my camera and some empty bags to see what I could find.

I got sidetracked. But it was good.

Shortly after leaving my house, I saw two guys on fully loaded touring bikes. That's not a very common sight around here, so I took notice. I went on my way, running a quick errand, and then I saw them again on the bike path about an hour later, so I decided to talk to them.

They just arrived in NYC today, from Montreal, after seven days of riding. They weren't really focused on seeing New York--the trip was all about the journey and they're catching a train back to Montreal tonight--but they did want to stop by Central Park and see the John Lennon "Imagine" memorial. I volunteered to ride with them as a sort of tour guide. Truth is, despite living in New York for 11 years, I had never seen it myself. I always imagined it was much bigger...go figure.

John Lennon "Imagine" memorial, Strawberry Fields, Central Park

(hey guys, if you find my website, send me a message, I'd like to know more about your trip, since I'd like to do a similar ride in reverse.)

I rode with them a little more, before parting ways. It's cool to be a part of such a journey, even if it was only for a couple of hours in my own city.

Tomorrow, I'm taking the car to Home Depot to pick up some supplies, and then drop my sewing machine off to get repaired. Hopefully a working machine and a studio full of materials will help me be more productive before my vacation is over and I'm back at the office.

do-it-yourself

Awhile back I mentioned that I want to start making sculptures that would avoid some of the storage, weight, and environmental problems of my prior work in concrete. Well, despite the fact that I still have some new ideas that will be big, heavy, and made of concrete, I have started a new project that will re-use old materials and be very lightweight. I'm not ready to divulge the content of the project, but it involves fusing plastic bags together to form thick, durable sheets of plastic, similar to Tyvek, which can be used like a fabric to construct forms.

After spending some time experimenting with various techniques of fusing the bags, I decided that I should try to actually make something:
This is a waterproof liner (left) for my cotton duck army surplus bag (right). Cotton duck is virtually waterproof on its own, but if it really gets soaked, water will make it's way through the canvas and this liner should protect the contents from getting wet. It fits perfectly:
Besides being good practice for my upcoming sculpture, this should be useful for my bike camping trip this weekend. The army surplus bag is another example of DIY engineering. My bicycle is set up with racks for mounting panniers so that I can carry stuff. I bought 2 of those army surplus bags and modified them so that they would work with my bicycle racks.

First I sewed a strip of webbing (cannibalized from the excessively long straps on my backpack) on the back of each bag so that I could attach bungee cords to the bag (left pic below). I bent a wire coat hanger into a hook on the midpoint of each bungee cord so that I could attach the bags to the rack. The hooks on the ends of the bungee cords are hooked onto the buckles that were conveniently already on the bags (right pic).
Actually, those buckles are really convenient, because they are for backpack straps. I can take the bag off my bike, remove the bungee cord, and wear it as a backpack. The other bag can be worn as a shoulder bag. Here's a picture of the bags set up for shoulder and back use:
After getting the bags attached to the rack, I needed to come up with a solution to prevent the bags from bending backwards into the spokes and potentially locking up the front wheel, which would be very bad. I found a bumper on the side of the road from a car wreck and cut it into plastic strips, which I bolted to the interior of each bag to stabilize the back side (see pic below...note the grommets on the bottom corners to allow for water drainage in case the bag gets flooded):
That's it for all of the functional modifications. The only other thing I did was to give each bag some character. I sewed on a bunch of old patches I acquired by trading with other kids back when I was a Boy Scout. I think it looks pretty good:

Mapping NYC by Photograph

Currently on view at the New York Public Library: Eminent Domain: Contemporary Photography and the City. The exhibition consists of six New York based artists who have each put together a photographic project with his/her own take on surveying the city.

Bettina Johae (a friend from grad school) contributed Borough Edges, NYC, a multi-faceted project consisting of over 2400 photographs documenting the boundaries of each of New York's five boroughs. I've had the opportunity to see this project in various forms as Bettina developed it over the past few years and this current manifestation is the best so far. The installation consists of a hand drawn wall map alongside five synchronized digital slide shows (one for each borough), and a wall-mounted book of framed prints for each borough, pairing selected prints with their respective locations on the line map.

In addition, there is a comprehensive website mapping all of the photographs, and Bettina is leading various bicycle tours along sections of each borough's edges (yesterday was The Bronx tour). The Internet component and the bike tours are integral in a way, because they span the full spectrum of the project. Bettina made her photographs while cycling around the city and as a result the project is in some ways limited to her own personal real-life experience of the city's edges. The only way to really get that is to travel the map and see it for yourself. On the other hand, Bettina accumulated a large amount of visual data which couldn't possibly be fully represented or absorbed in a gallery setting. In that sense, the project has really become about organizing and disseminating this information in a meaningful and useful way, and the Internet is particularly well suited to that end.
http://digital.nypl.org/boroughedges/

All photographs from Borough Edges, NYC, by Bettina Johae, selected because they are of the Bronx & Manhattan borders surrounding my neighborhood.

Second post today, still no original content from me, but this cartoon by Rex Babin is too good to not pass along:

Politics as usual or take the exit?
(...found the cartoon on Streetsblog)

It's dead.

Well, they finally killed it.

It seems the NY State Assembly prefers that we continue to have everyone foot the bill of our congestion "tax" in the form of heavy traffic, pollution, and mass transit deficiency instead of having the minority of road users pay the price directly in real money. The privilege of the few has been put above the needs of the many. Congestion pricing was a plan that would have had a negative impact on very few New Yorkers and would have had positive results for nearly everyone (improved train service, new Metro-North stations, bus rapid transit, better cycling infrastructure, cleaner air, and faster commutes for those who actually need to drive, etc.).

The state assembly basically decided we don't need to discourage unnecessary driving into the city. Hell, if you subtract the sunk cost of a monthly garage and have just one passenger to split the price of gas, (or maybe you park for free with one of those [often illegal] placards), it might even be cheaper to drive to work than to take the subway. I can only conclude that they want us to drive into the central business district.

Next month is Bike Month NYC and May 16 is "Bike to Work Day." That's stupid. I bike to work everyday, why not give me and all the other cyclists (and transit riders) a break? Let's make May 16 "Take a Car to Work Day." I propose that the vast majority of non-driving New Yorkers either drive, carpool, or take a cab to work that day. Driving is the best option. The more single occupant personal automobiles the better (extra credit for luxury SUVs), but taking a cab is good too. I'm sure there's more than enough cabs to take millions of people into the city at rush hour. This is what NYC needs to transport our citizens, revitalize our health, and jumpstart our economy, right? Every man for himself.

Greatest Invention Ever

There's really nothing quite like riding a bicycle. So much potential from such a simple machine. It's passenger is it's engine. I really believe the bicycle is mankind's greatest invention.

Fenders, racks, and 3 bottle cages; my bike is equipped to ride cross-country rain or shine.

Since I was short on time before my class yesterday evening, I decided to skip the studio and hop on my bike instead. I use the street to ride to work everyday, but since I had no where in particular to go, I got on the West Side Greenway for a more scenic (and car-free) ride. It's nice to ride a bike without any particular purpose. Riding is often my favorite part of the day. It puts one's mind at ease. I do some of my best thinking on my bicycle (assuming I'm not preoccupied by traffic). If you don't already ride, I highly recommend it.

Get a bicycle. You will not regret it if you live. -Mark Twain

At least the studio is ready, even if I'm not there

When I woke up today, it was snowing pretty hard. It wasn't sticking, and I knew it wouldn't last long, but the forecast is predicting rain for the afternoon. I rely on my bicycle to get to my studio and even though bad weather doesn't normally stop me from riding, I wimped out today. Probably because I hate cleaning my bike after riding in the rain, and I recently got soaked really bad on Friday night's downpour. Now the weather isn't even that bad, but it's a bit too late for me to go.

At least I finally finished getting the studio set up. I also started building support panels which I will use for mounted drawings, similar to these. I was planning on mounting the paper today and starting some small studies. Instead, now that I've decided to stay home, I will do some sketches in my book and work on some ideas I've been thinking about for new sculptures...more info on that in the near future. I think I'll also study Mandarin for a bit. 下個星其一晚上我有第一中文課。(Next Monday evening I have my first Chinese class.)