City of Ottawa A bike corral along Wellington Street West in Hintonburg.Bike corrals — metal contraptions that provide parking for a dozen bikes in the space of one on-street car-parking spot — may be coming to Centretown.
After a successful two-year pilot project, the City of Ottawa plans to install three new corrals in 2016 on a trial basis, and the transportation committee will meet in early 2017 to discuss a permanent plan.
The bike corrals are bright orange, made of wrought iron and feature an iron cutout of a cartoon bike on each end.
Ottawa has already had three functioning bike corrals, one on Second Avenue in the Glebe, one on Wellington Street West in Hintonburg and another at Wellington Street West and Clarendon Avenue, that were installed in 2014 as part of the pilot project. The corral at Wellington West and Clarendon was removed in October 2014 after local business owners complained that it was making stores less accessible to customers.
The Hintonburg and Glebe corrals will be returned to the same spots this spring, along with several new corrals that will be placed throughout Ottawa. The third corral will be relocated, says Robert Grimwood, the city’s senior project manager of sustainable transportation.
“We were testing these corrals to see if they had value, if people would use them and if they had any benefits,” Grimwood says. “We’ve found that they do . . . I anticipate that they will become an annual thing in Ottawa.”
The feedback on the bike corrals was mostly positive, Grimwood says, and there is potential for the project to grow if there is a demand for something more permanent.
“We’re at the point of a moto-shift,” says Zachary Dayler, the executive director of the Wellington West Business Improvement Area. “More people are taking the bus, more people are walking and more people are biking.”
He adds: “If they find the right locations and they put the corrals where people are going to use them, they are going to draw people to them and they are going to help organize the streets better.”
In regards to the corral that was removed from Wellington Street West, Dayler says that, “I don’t think the people who were concerned about it were concerned about the bike corral, I think they were concerned about the location.
“If it were in a different place in the same area it probably would not have caused much of an issue
. . . We saw that with the success of the Hintonburg one, that location worked out really well.”
Dayler adds: “I think it was a great first attempt. Lesson learned about making sure that you’re picking a location that will work.”
Centretown may offer such a location. “We’re trying to focus on areas where we have high bike traffic already,” Grimwood says of the four new spots to be selected for this year’s bike-corral program expansion. “We’re looking for locations where we’re seeing lots of bikes locked to trees, or locked to fence posts, or any spots where they could be getting in the way and creating issues.
“One of the things that is driving the interest in this program is the increase we’ve seen in the number of people that are biking to get around downtown,” he says. “There is definitely the potential to encourage more people to use cycling as their main transport mode.”
Grimwood says that from what he has observed in the pilot project, the effect that the corrals will have on car traffic is minimal. “It does take away a spot that would be available for a car,” he says, “but in that place there’s 10 bike spots available.”
Alex deVries, vice-president of Citizens for Safe Cycling, says that the corrals have had a positive impact on Ottawa’s cycling culture. “This is one small part of the infrastructure,” he says, “that we need to get more people to take a bike instead of a car.”