The council has received £806,600 from the Sustrans Places for Everyone Fund and Cycling Scotland’s Cycle Storage Fund and will now roll out 200 new Cyclehoop hangars in the next year.
This is Phase 2 of the project, although there are still 1586 people on the waiting list for Phase 1. The new hangars will be installed in the next couple of months except for four locations where the Traffic Regulation Order (TRO) process is not yet complete. Council officers have advised that the TRO process for the secure cycle parking has taken longer than expected.
The council also plans a number of adapted units for cargo bikes or adapted cycles which will improve the accessibility and inclusivity of the project. These can be swapped in wherever required. There are also plans for smaller units for narrower spaces.
The locations for these units will be prioritised on the basis of population density, existing coverage, number of requests and Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD) decile.
This map shows the hangars installed or about to be installed in Phase 1 and the likely locations for Phase 2.
Users currently pay £6 a month to have a space for a bike in one of the lockers, and largely this has proved to be acceptable to users with only five complaints about the charge. The council says in its latest report that it is to “price the scheme at less than a resident’s parking permit”, but this is already the case for all parking permits no matter where they are in the city, (except for example permits for smaller cars of 0 to 1000cc in zones 5-8, S1-S4 and N1-N5 which are all under £50).
A Cyclehoop hangar takes up a parking space, but there are six spaces for bikes in each. It provides security for bike owners at ground level with easy access, and will prevent people living in tenements from having to park a bike in the stair or in their flat.
The cost produces only £1 out of the £6 charge which is paid to the council. That is not profit it is to maintain the scheme and cover some of the running costs.
Cllr Scott Arthur said: “Currently we have 108 of the lockers on street, with six spaces each and we’re going to increase that by 272 over the next year or so. That’s 1632 spaces. So essentially, it will be more or less tripling the amount of space we have.”
Cllr Arthur continued: “I don’t think that this will be the end of the scheme. I think that it’s one of those things that the more people see them on the street the more people will want them near them. Another thing we will want to look into in the short term is to look at the costs. At the moment it is a flat cost for everyone. I think it makes sense that if we’re going to target areas of social deprivation more that we have a lower cost for people who are on lower incomes. But we will still be able to meet the total costs within the budget for the scheme. So it might mean people in more affluent areas will have to pay more.”
The Transport Convener said that he recognised there had been more secure bike lockers placed in more affluent areas. Council officers will now add weighting to areas of social deprivation when identifying where the lockers will be placed. This will be used as a way of getting people in more deprived areas more active.
People have been asking for lockers on their streets at the rate of six per week on average, and the Convener said that they want people to keep on asking as there will be more money available in due course.
In common with many other transport projects this one has taken years to implement. It was first discussed in February 2012, and a pilot scheme began in August 2014. During 2020 spaces for 1,080 bikes in these hangars were created.
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