The system we use for parking and storing bikes at school is simple. We have a series of bike racks lined up against a fence. This area happens to be on the side of the Addison building, where it is barely wide enough for a bike. For most of the area people can store their bikes, there is gravel laid down for a smooth bikeway. But for the other section, it is a driveway, that is very uneven.
There are several problems that this system presents. First of all, when we took a survey, we found that roughly 30 people bike daily. The other thing we calculated was that the current situation fits comfortably 15-17 bikes without any of them falling over. In addition to this, when there isn’t any more room on the racks, people park the bikes on the side of the building, which causes the people who parked in the racks to not be able to get their bikes out. But when someone tries to just cram all the bikes in on the racks, the bikes get knocked over, sometimes causing a ‘domino effect.’
To clarify, our goal is to redesign the bike parking situation in a way that is friendly to many different people. The inspiration was as such; we saw that the problem was affecting people’s ability to park their bikes at school and it was affecting their moods, and frustration before and after school, and we decided we want to come up with a solution. Our project was to design a new way to store the bikes that is compact, comfortable, and fits the number of bikers that actually bike. And the objective was simply to improve the system that affects everyone from bikes, to people playing on the field who were influenced by the bikes spilling over.
One challenge that we faced was simply brainstorming and coming up with a solution, but we eventually came up with an effective and compact solution by using vertical bike racks. With the use of vertical bike racks, we can fit more bikes in less space.
We learned a lot about how in every problem there are multiple sides. For instance, it was not only bikers who were frustrated, but also people using the field, because the bikes interfered with other games. If we had more time, the next steps would be to fully build and install the system that we designed. For any others looking to do similar projects, be sure to start prototyping early to have solid, 3D designs to present in addition to any drawings and/or pictures.
If we had more time to work on our project we would outfit the field at our school with 15 sets of these new vertical bike racks, but this would require about 1.5 hours per racks which would ultimately add up to 22.5 hours in total. As well costing around $250 for wood $34 for hardware and $96 for hooks in total is $380 for 15 racks.
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