Worth putting balloons out. The only covered cycle parking in Watford

Cycle Parking is an essential part of any Council’s provision for cyclists. Watford Borough Council has installed cycle parking at many locations through its town centre but some was over subscribed while in other places it was underused. The Council therefore commissioned Transport Initiatives to survey what was there and recommend locations for new sites.

Fly-parked bike locked to a street sign

We visited every street within a defined area and recorded

• The number, type, condition and location of every cycle parking stand we saw
• How close that stand was to its nearest neighbour
• The number of cycles parked each stand
• The number and location of any ‘fly-parked’ cycles locked to street furniture.
• The number of abandoned bikes locked to stands

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Three ‘Harrogate Hoops’

The most common type of parking stand in Watford was a Sheffield stand variant called the Harrogate Hoop. This has a rounded top tube rather than a horizontal one. There were 146 Sheffield or Harrogate stands and 15 ‘butterfly’ stands that hold bikes by the front wheel. Only one set of stands was covered (in Broadway). Sheffield or Harrogate stands can support two bikes (one each side) provided they are not spaced too close together. Theoretically the number of cycle spaces was 273 but poor spacing meant that in practice there were only 258. Guidance at the time of the survey recommended that stands were spaced at 1.0m apart (although many in Watford were spaced at 800mm apart) whereas today guidance suggests 1.2m.

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We surveyed use of stands on a Thursday in September (109 cycles seen), a Saturday in October (106 cycles) and a later Friday in October (126 cycles).

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Back in the office we could work out where there was pressure for new parking and which parts of the town had enough for now. In some areas of the town centre provision was sufficient, in others it barely met demand while in small sections it was over subscribed with all the stands full and additional cycles parked against street furniture. When on site we had recorded all locations where additional cycle parking stands could be installed.

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We recommended that the council

• replace any damaged stands
• install 78 new stands at 24 sites
• monitor use of the stands on a regular basis so they could identify areas of the town centre where stands were all in use
• start a rolling programme of adding a small number of stands each year based on evidence from their monitoring.

Another interesting cycle parking project investigated the feasibility of on-street residential cycle parking in West Yorkshire

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(posted 20/11/23)