Sometimes, I do stupid things. Like leave my house without my keys. And often, I don’t realize I’ve done a stupid thing until it’s sort of too late to fix it, at least for the short-term.
This morning, for example, I met my friend at Planet Granite for some early-morning climbing — except that when I got there, I attempted to lock my bike and realized that though my lock was in my bag, the key that would allow me to actually use my lock was somewhere else much less helpful.
Luckily, the Planet Granite people are awesome, and when I told the fellow inside that I could neither check in to the gym (my membership card is on my keychain) nor lock my bike, he gave me a bike lock to borrow! Apparently there’s a loaner there, so in return for my ID (I did have my wallet, at least), I got the lock for as long as I needed it.
The key even had a cute little climbing hold attached to it. Awww.
(lest I forget where I borrowed it from:)
Businesses often talk about being bike-friendly (in fact, there’s a whole Bike-Friendly Business designation in Oregon). Today reminded me that there are many way to be so. Some places will give discounts to cyclists. Some will have ample and covered bike parking. The Bike-Friendly Business certification, in fact, gives a whole list of things a business can do to be officially considered bike friendly.
Having an extra bike lock that people can borrow is one of those excellent ways that lets people on bikes know that hey! We thought about what you might actually need, and have gone out of our way to provide it. Thanks, Planet Granite, for allowing me to secure my bike even when I was too silly to be able to do it on my own.
Do you have any ideas about the bike equivalent of zip car? At CSUN, my students are always getting their bikes stolen (you know, expensive bike, cheap lock), but if the university had something like a set of bikes just for the campus…I think there are some communities in LA that are testing this out. Happy cycling!
Bike share! I actually don’t know tons about it, but I do know that New York and Washington DC both have fairly robust bike-sharing systems that work much like Zipcar (New York’s for example: http://www.citibikenyc.com/).
Actually, it looks like Wikipedia has a whole list, broken down by country, of bike-share-equipped cities, and a separate list broken down by country for universities with bike share programs as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bicycle-sharing_systems. Maybe you could take a field trip to a nearby university (how far is Occidental College?) to see how it works! :)
Thanks for the tip!