How a Toronto Hotel Welcomes Bicycling Guests
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 05.12.07
I bicycled to Toronto's Sheraton Centre to attend the Architects Convention, (title: Healthy Buildings Healthy Communities) where the Escalades and Lexi are lined up under the lights at the entrance. Over to the side: this, the most disgusting bike rack I have ever seen, replete with a years worth of cigarette butts and almost no room to park a bike for all of the stripped wrecks. Is this the message that a major convention centre and tourist hotel in a supposedly bike friendly city wants to give to its visitors to a conference on healthy cities? Evidently.
Are bicyclists treated better or worse where you live? Send us a picture, either to lloyd (at) treehugger.com or flickr tagged as treehuggerbikerack.
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My experience is that it is very well aranged in Austria, Norway and Sweden, can't judge about others ;)
I agree wholeheartedly that "infrastructure" to support the growing need and want to use bicycles, even as simple as racks, is seriously lacking in Southern Ontario. I go to Queen's University where hardly any students drive; we all walk or bike. That said, I have seen some of the worst designs (and I'm a mechanical engineering grad) for bike racks; ones that don't work with U-locks (they don't reach), ones that require you to get on your hands and knees to reach the darn things, ones that won't let you back in or lock more than just a wheel, and ones that fit a single bike for two metres of lateral parking space. Outrageous. Actually, now that you've got me raving about this, I think I'll write to our student government to see that this is changed!