With more than 350 days of sunshine each year, Palm Springs is the ideal city to get around town on a bicycle. The City of Palm Springs is now making it easier for visitors and residents to ride downtown with its new Bicycle Friendly Business District. In cooperation with local businesses, the City’s Office of Sustainability developed an innovative plan for bike parking which includes a map of bike infrastructure that divides the downtown area into three districts, each designated by a specific color: South District (yellow), North District (blue) and the Downtown District (orange). The color coding is used to differentiate and market each district, with matching banners and parking areas in the form of whimsical bicycle-shaped racks. These areas soon will have fix-it stations and kiosks displaying the area maps as well.
With the help of nearly $80,000 in Clean Transportation Funding from the Mobile Source Air Pollution Reduction Review Committee, the City installed sixty bicycle-shaped racks, twenty “hitch” bike racks, and three bike corrals in the downtown area, providing 166 spaces for bike parking. Bike corrals are located near the curb, and are about the length and width of a parallel street parking space. This allows cyclists to park their bikes without taking sidewalk space away from pedestrians.
Michele Mician, Manager of the Office of Sustainability, heard about other communities that had created Bicycle Friendly Business Districts and thought, let’s do this in Palm Springs. The City brought the downtown merchants together to discuss the idea and they agreed it would be beneficial. “We want to really get people invested in biking for errands and not just recreation. With our Bicycle Friendly Business District, we get the businesses engaged and we see that both the cyclists and the businesses benefit. When you are on a bike you might take more time to explore the area, you are at a slower pace and you will stop more to see what there is to do,” said Michele.
They City worked with local businesses to “host” a bike rack or racks, where the City provides the bike infrastructure free-of-charge and the business sponsors the rack by paying for the installation and, in some cases, providing the property on which the bike racks are installed. The feedback the City has received has been very positive - both visitors and businesses love the new bike racks.
To promote the new bike district, the Office of Sustainability joined in several events to celebrate Bike Month in the City. They partnered with the Parks and Recreation Department and the Police Department for the annual Palm Springs Bike Rodeo to help kids learn about bicycle safety. Fifty bike helmets and more than 300 safety lights were handed out, along with bike safety brochures. An estimated 250 riders participated in the Cycledelic night-ride, biking a six-mile loop through downtown, with 500 people cheering them on as spectators. At these events, bike trail maps highlighting the new bike friendly district were distributed to get the word out about the new downtown bike amenities.
The Bicycle Friendly Business District helps furthers the City’s goals in Palm Springs’ Your Sustainable City initiative to promote a clean and healthy environment, strong community engagement, and a thriving economy. This project also achieved some of the elements in the City’s bicycle plans that are a part of the Coachella Valley Council of Government's Non-Motorized Transportation Plan, adopted by the City in 2011. In addition to providing opportunities for pedestrian and recreational activities, the plan is to designed to make biking an integral part of the transportation system by implementing a bikeway network, providing the necessary infrastructure and encouraging bicycles as a convenient and safe mode of transportation.
These new bicycle amenities now give people visiting downtown a better option to choose riding their bikes over riding in a car, helping them maintain an active and healthy lifestyle while contributing to cleaner air by staying out of their cars. Michelle explained, “The more bicycling infrastructure we have the more likely people will ride. That means less cars downtown. We have large scale events like our weekly village fest that draws a lot of people from all over. If we can get locals to ride to events and use the corrals for their bike parking we will see a dramatic reduction in emissions.”