NIMBY locals "concerned and distressed" by "giant ugly" bike hangar

So "The value of the house will be affected", what evidence do you have to back up that statement?

And yet housing in towns and cities gain value when there is good cycling facilities and public transport to hand. With more and more towns introducing congestion charges and the fact that the majority of journeys are less than 2 miles. Having good sustainable facilities becomes very attractive. Where I used to live I only used the car for long journeys as I could walk and cycle everywhere I went. If you are in suburbia or some rural village then the priorities change. If you look at this particular road on google map you will see that it looks like a rat run to avoid the main street. Street View shows cars parked up and bins sitting out on the pavement. The removal of one parking bay to facilitate parking for 6 residents is very much freeing up the road space and creating a better environment. 

There probably was a consultation tbh but B&H Council do have a habit of just popping them up on their website as opposed to making a song & dance about it.

They did this when there was all the noise about the cycles lanes which went in over the pandemic. Everybody was cross about not being consulted but guess what was there in abundance on the council's website.....

Also anyone who doesn't have a motor vehicle could request double yellow lines outside their house to stop ugly cars from being parked there.

That will have no effect, motorists will just claim "loading" or "drop off" or just deploy their BOLAS.  Even if you added double-yellow "flashes" on the kerb for no loading it won't change anything.  You either have to pay for a warden to be on station 24/7 (plus a bouncer...) or go straight to double-red, no stopping.

So the only reliable way to avoid having motor vehicles parked outside your house * is to have motor vehicles moving (fast) outside your house.

Or live in a private car park - many people are wary of those!

* Unless you're a councillor or police inspector or someone.  If you're properly important you'll be monied so you can just buy a place that's much further from the road.

If they get really pissy, I'd suggest buying a Fiat Multipla and parking that outside. They'd soon appreciate the asthetic qualities of a bike bin.

How about the Multipla 1958 version, which could easily double as bike storage?

Too pretty.

Confess - that's just a ski-lift gondola on wheels, isn't it?

Bonus for the UK though - you'd never have someone park so close you couldn't open the door.

Wiker seats!?

Awesome car - no slagging off the Multipla please! 

Because its EXACTLY what she said!? Nice of you to encourage vandalism

"..seizure of shared public space..."

You mean like the use of public roads by private cars as a car park?

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Oh dear, your great self-declared intellectual genius is clearly not up to snuff today. If only you had bothered to read the article you would realise the very simple errors you make. No-one wants you say, yet 359 out of 360 spaces to date have been snapped up and more people are on the waiting list. Sounds like at least 600 people want them for starters Strange definition of no-one, but then again I have noticed you aren't too hot on accurate definitions when it suits you.

No excuse for seizure of shared public space when bikes can be kept on private property you say. I am sure the exact same thing is true of cars. I manage to park both of mine on my property and don't need to seize shared public space to park them on the road / pavement. The caveat of course is that it's only possible to store either bike or car on private property IF you are lucky enough to have the space.

Nigel Garrage wrote:

No one wants this kind of carbuncle ANYWHERE in the country.

Given that there are 51,000 people on waiting lists for a hangar space in London alone, the claim that nobody wants them is clearly nonsense.

Nigel Garrage wrote:

Direct action by residents to ensure that this structure was unusable would resolve the issue permanently.

Oh cool, is that allowed? So if someone parks a Ford Ranger outside my house, which is taller, longer, wider and to my mind far uglier than a bike hangar, it's OK if I ensure it's unusable?

Nigel Garrage wrote:

There is no excuse in this seizure of shared public space, when bikes can be kept inside private property.

Not everyone lives in nasty modern Barrett homes in cul-de-sacs in leafy Essex, Nigel, for people on the top floor of a Victorian house storing a bike indoors is difficult, impractical or even impossible, particularly for elderly people or those with disabilities (before you accuse me of self interest, we have a large garden flat in which we can easily store all six of our bikes and we have not applied for a hangar space, nor would we).

Nigel Garrage wrote:

Finally, despite there being no mention of cost of installation or price of leasing a space, I guarantee that the cost of the scheme will far outweigh any monies earned, which is disgraceful considering that people have to pay a king's ransom to park their cars.

In my road in London a space in a bike hangar costs £60 p.a.; each hangar holds six bikes and takes up the space of an average-sized saloon car, so £360 a year revenue, while a parking permit to take up the same space with a car costs £130 - £210. As for installation costs, certainly in my borough these are met by the private company that runs the scheme. The council did subsidise the scheme to the tune of a massive £15 per space, but this has now been withdrawn, so the scheme costs the council a sum total of £0 p.a. The road was resurfaced last year, including the parking bays, at an approximate cost of £220,000. There are roughly 100 parking spaces, so it'll be a good ten years before the drivers have paid for the capital cost of their spaces, before which time it'll doubtless need resurfacing again.

Please keep your moronic prejudiced opinions to yourself.

Nope - it's directing the use of about 3% of residents' parking space so it benefits 10x as many people, which seems reasonable to me.

Given that two of these in a parking space raises about £600 a year in revenue, vs around £200 for a resident's parking permit, it's the latter who need to make a businss case for the below market rate they are paying for on-road storage.

A sensible balance would meet the demand for cycle storage at £1 per week (which would cut out casual use), and then see how much space (I guess 90-95%) was left for motor vehicles. 90% of space for cars would let 1.3x as many bikes as cars be stored overall.

I can't find a letters' page on the Brighton Argus, or I'd write suggesting that, and that the resident permit charge be increased to £500 - just to see the frothing.

If "no one wants them" why are spaces in them already sold out, on pretty much every scheme nationwide ?
What about the seizure of public pand for the storage of private vehicels, which occurs daily... with reesidents leaving notes and going outside abusing people who DARE to park a car on the public highway outside their home, claiming that "they always park their car there" ?
As for cost, generally the bike hanger bring in many times more income per parking space used than a resident permit to leave a car there would bring in. In fact usually a single bike space in one outstrips the costs of keeping a car there, and the hangers can hold multiple bikes. Now if £50 a year is "pathetic" and thse hangers hold let's say 6 bikes, that means that £300 a year for a car to have a permit in the same street is "pathetic" and should immediately be increased to £600 ? 

Logically, even if you don't want bike hangars installed in the first place, you might still decide use the hangar if you get overruled, especially at the artificially low, loss-making prices the council offers. That doesn't nullify the fact that no one needs to store a bike in a specially erected bike hangar in the first place. There is a large additional cost of installing and maintaining the bike hangar vs a standard car parking space, plus the costs of administration, which you haven't factored into your reasoning. It is unlikely that charging someone 50 quid a year to rent a space would ever recoup the initial cost of the hangar itself, although I have no figures for its initial cost (do you?).

As for the other stuff you've posted, you have to remember that people often need a car to function as a valuable member of society, whether that be too get to work or visit friends and loved ones.

I think there are question marks around the right cost of provision of public spaces for car owners, but we are where we are in terms of antiquated housing stock, and it isn't right morally to deprive the working poor of their freedom by making car parking too expensive. If personally like to see an increase in cost of parking permits, with perhaps a discount for people in band D or below housing.

Rakia wrote:

Logically, even if you don't want bike hangars installed in the first place, you might still decide use the hangar if you get overruled, especially at the artificially low, loss-making prices the council offers. That doesn't nullify the fact that no one needs to store a bike in a specially erected bike hangar in the first place. There is a large additional cost of installing and maintaining the bike hangar vs a standard car parking space, plus the costs of administration, which you haven't factored into your reasoning. It is unlikely that charging someone 50 quid a year to rent a space would ever recoup the initial cost of the hangar itself, although I have no figures for its initial cost (do you?). As for the other stuff you've posted, you have to remember that people often need a car to function as a valuable member of society, whether that be too get to work or visit friends and loved ones. I think there are question marks around the right cost of provision of public spaces for car owners, but we are where we are in terms of antiquated housing stock, and it isn't right morally to deprive the working poor of their freedom by making car parking too expensive. If personally like to see an increase in cost of parking permits, with perhaps a discount for people in band D or below housing.

1. How are you so sure that nobody needs to store their bike in one of these hangars? Isn't that like saying nobody needs to store their car on the road?

2. What is this guff about the working poor? Or, as we like to call, it: "a straw man"?

As your man says on notjustbikes - requiring people to shell out for a car just to be able to have a place in society might not be optimal for people. Follow the money - who benefits? The people or the motor trade and their backers? (A diverting rabbit-hole looms on the subject of parasitism and control and who benefits from a particular observed behaviour but dodging that).

Having noted that though it's hard to dodge another rabbit hole of "who's getting the benefits of society?" in that the rule for human societies seems to be highly unequal distribution o f"goods" and duties or taxes. So you could of course argue that excluding chunks of the population - here: children, the disabled, the poor, some old people etc. - is entirely "natural" or at least the default. Or go full contrarian and suggest maybe civilisation is impossible without it!

I have been a cycle commuter for over 35 years. There were a few months when I was temping for the highways and doing work on the motorways, litter picking and ditch digging, when I was being picked up, but apart from that, the bicycle.

Since I got to work in the lab, for over twenty years at the bench, I think it's two days not cycling. Both times I walked in. One of those was because I had sliced most of the end of my finger off, when cleaning a laminar flow cabinet, the anecdote would have been perfect if it had been a biological safety cabinet.

Really?  So people who cycle or walk are not valuable members of society?  

It's an old Nigel trope - another of his banned user giveaways - he's trolling the supposed moderators as much as the readers.

He also believes that all car journeys are essential and all bike journeys are pointless circles.

Rakia wrote:

It is unlikely that charging someone 50 quid a year to rent a space would ever recoup the initial cost of the hangar itself, although I have no figures for its initial cost (do you?).

Each hangar has space for six bicycles, therefore 6 subscribers, therefore £300 per year. Plus, why do they need to recoup the cost? Our local council spends a fortune each year remarking parking spaces on resurfaced roads that are free to park on ... they are guaranteed never to recoup that cost. Why do only car owners have an entitlement to the council providing a useful service?

Rakia wrote:

As for the other stuff you've posted, you have to remember that people often need a car to function as a valuable member of society

And plenty of valuable members of society don't have (or can't afford) a car, and choose/need to get around by bicycle ... often without the space to store one properly inside their home. Or they live on the fourth floor with no way of getting it up there bar manhandling it up the stairs.  

Rakia wrote:

 ... it isn't right morally to deprive the working poor of their freedom by making car parking too expensive.

it also isn't morally right to refuse to provide facilities to the working poor who can't afford a car. 

Quote:

Rakia - No one wants this kind of carbuncle ANYWHERE in the country. I bet it's something pathetic..

I've removed all of the unnecessary (and inaccurate) words - the whole post is now easier to understand, and much more accurate