Dublin City expects to install 400 on-street bicycle lockers

Dublin City Council expects to install around 400 on-street bicycle lockers — branded as BikeBunkers — in the next three years.

The lockers are designed for households that do not have their own secure bicycle storage facility — such as smaller city centres houses, houses of different sizes with no rear access, and apartments with no secure storage for bicycles.

Funding of €1.5m over three years has been allocated for the BikeBunkers in Dublin City, which amounts to around 400 lockers. The first two units were installed last week in Dublin 8, and 8 more lockers are expected to be installed shortly after the New Year, with the locations including Stoneybatter.

The Dublin lockers are offered to residents at €100 per space per year. The roll out programme will start with the city centre, between the canals. Dublin City Council Beta, which is running the roll out, said on Twitter: “We‘ll be using 3 different designs of hangars and will be looking for your feedback on visual preferences.”

Back in November, DCC Beta said that demand for the units were running at 237 households looking for 352 spaces, which equates to something like 100 BikeBunkers. You can show your internist via Bikebunkers.ie.

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Waltham Forest, an outer London borough known for its cycling promotion programme, has installed over 350 of the Cyclehoop version of the lockers called Bikehangers in just a few years. These offering secure storage to around 1,500 residents. Neighbouring borough Hackney has over 1,000 Bikehangar units.

The Dutch city of Utrecht has about 90 of Fietshangar version of the lockers with a capacity of around 470 bicycles, and Rotterdam has over 800 of the units. The lockers are also to be found — although not in the same volumes — in other Dutch cities such as Amstelveen, Amsterdam and Nijmegen, as well as in locations in Belgium, Germany, the Czech Republic, the UK, and elsewhere.

Dutch cities such as Utrecht also supplement the on-street bicycle lockers with around 40 city-run neighborhood parking units which hold around 20 to more than 100 bicycle per unit. These include disused small shops and amount to around 2,000 spaces across mostly older parts of Utrecht. Newer residential areas were covered by legally mandated storage spaces for each household.

Utrecht rents the bicycle lockers at €66 per year, and Rotterdam for a little less at €57. While the standard rate in London is £72 (€84), Waltham Forest offers them with heavily subsidised at £25 (€30) a year.

With a mix of the international price and Dublin’s residential car parking permit cost of just €50 per year, there has been some criticism of the €100 price tag planned in Dublin. In response to the criticism, DCC Beta said the service was still “in beta” and published a page on its website explaining the pricing.

“It might seem odd that Dublin City Council is charging more for a clean, quiet, healthy, civil mode of transport, but this page is hopefully explaining the rationale for initiating this service at this price,” DCC Beta said. It added: “Very possibly €100 is entirely the wrong price point. Perhaps it should be much lower, or perhaps (like the London borough councils), we’ll find that it should actually be higher. We’ll soon learn as the service develops in the real world.”

2 comments

  1. If storing one car costs 50 euro and storing a bunker full of bikes in the same amount of space costs from 400 to 800 euro depending on bunker type it would appear that either the cost for a car is too low or the cost for a bike is far too high.

    Reply
  2. Great to see this Beta project move forward. Fair play DCC. The price of €100 seems a little high, but that could deter users with a low regard for the service. It will be interesting to see the level of take up.

    Reply

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