For many Bath Residents living in flats it can be difficult to own a bike let alone own a much heavier eBike.

Bath now has the beginnings of a network of Bike Hangars and can rent a space for £42 per year through this link https://rentals.falco.co.uk/ BUT spaces are running out fast! Should a bike hangar be full, you can add yourself to the waiting list but unfortunately that might take a year.

Asking for more Bike Hangars

It’s clear that 24 spaces, 12 of which are in one street doesn’t really cut it. The rental site does provide a link to suggest a site but that only takes you to a default contact form so I am unsure how the council is collating these to measure demand in other areas of the city with high densities of apartments.

Neither is there a way to see suggested bike hangar locations and upvote them.

Missed opportunity to advertise what they are!

Any resident walking past the Bath Bike hangars might be under the impression its some sort of bin storage

While other councils have at least explained what they are!

Falco offer many exciting design options!

What the council needs to do to make it a real success

Don’t get me wrong, the fact we finally have bike hangars in the city is absolutely fantastic and the fact there are only 9 7 spaces left in under two weeks of the launch is phenomenal even with no advertising on the hangars themselves.

BUT right now, residents walking past these would have no idea what they are and neither is there a good way for the council to understand the demand for these across the city. That needs fixing urgently.

There also has to be a question raised as to why two hangars were sited in one location when other areas of the city have called out for a hangar. It’s also interesting to note that the the New King Street hangars are close to each other.

Census 2021 data could also help

Census 2021 data gives an indicator of where other areas might benefit. For example, there are whole areas of the city where not owning a car is the norm.

This maps to areas with large numbers of apartments:

Breaking down the £30,000 cost of the two year trial

Funding for this trial is coming from the Transport Improvement Plan and this has got some people’s knickers in a twist on social media, but let’s put this into context. The capital cost of a Hangar is around £4k (£16k for the trial) and they can easily last for 10+ years and can be written off over a few years. There are clearly some management, TRO, and installation overheads coming into play here that come with any trial.

Hangars take up half a car parking space. Two hangars generate £484 revenue a year from one car parking space significantly exceeding the income from selling resident parking permits, even after Falco take their management fee.

It’s also important to recognise that the commercial rent value of an on-street parking space is in the region of £1,000 to £2,000 and this car ownership subsidy is not recorded anywhere within the council accounts. By my reckoning, it amounts to at least £20 MILLION per year.

Successful but we need another 96!

With eBikes being true car replacements, low car ownership in many households, a high density of flats making storing a bike extremely hard if not impossible, and hangars able to store 12 “vehicles” in the space of one car; the council should be looking to install at least 100 more of these hangars across Bath in the coming years.

But to achieve that the council needs to be much better at capturing and understanding demand.

Finally I think it’s important for everyone to recognise that a eBikes and car clubs truly can mean not owning a car is possible in cities, but to enable that in Bath, there needs to be much much more secure dry bike parking available.