6 ms·
A bike ramp into the apartment is useless. You can just take the elevator with your bike, or you know... Just make a garage for bikes on ground floor. The artic
by Avalaxy 11y ago
A bike ramp into the apartment is useless. You can just take the elevator with your bike, or you know... Just make a garage for bikes on ground floor. The article doesn't really say much about how to design a city for bicycles, which mostly comes down to providing good roads where you aren't bothered by cars.
- micheljansen 11y agoYep, I live in the Netherlands and my apartment complex has a separate entrance to a bicycle storage area on street level, which connects to the central hallway. Parking's only half the story though. You also need to feel safe to ride a bike, which requires infrastructure and attitude.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- mayneack 11y agoAlso to make the ramp reach a reasonable height with a reasonable angle, you'd have to have incredibly long buildings that would require going all the way to one end to reach the top floor.
- jules 11y agoIndeed, even taking the stairs would be much faster. With a bike you would carry more weight to the top, and go a longer distance. This more than offsets the difference between walking and biking.
- logfromblammo 11y agoYes. I stopped reading there. Any architect who thinks floor-traversing ramps will ever be preferred over elevators had best start designing temporary homes from cardboard, in anticipation of living in one.
- logfromblammo 11y agoElaborating on this somewhat. Let say, for example, that the interfloor distance in your city residential building is 150". According to ADA codes, the maximum slope for a ramp is 1:12. The maximum rise for a ramp is 30", requiring a landing before and after at least 60" long. So to climb one story in the ramped building, you need 5 ramps total, plus 6 landings. Each ramp is 360" long, and each landing 60" long. The total horizontal distance, per floor, is 2160", or 180', or 55m. The minimum width of a ramp is 36". Your ramp area is going to be at least 540ft^2 (51m^2). On each floor. In contrast, each elevator takes up about 27ft^2 (2.5m^2) per floor. You could have 20 elevators operating in the same space as a ramp only wide enough for one person to use at a time. And if you live on the 11th floor, are you really going to ride your bike around in tight circles for at least a third of a mile just to reach street level? Or are you going to ride to the bike-through elevator and have it move you that vertical distance instead? So when I imply that the architect that puts bike ramps on the inside of high-rise buildings will eventually be homeless, it is only because that person suffers from a fundamental disconnect from reality that is so much worse than just a simple lack of common sense. New passenger elevators in urban high-rise buildings are probably the most efficient vehicles for moving people between locations that currently exist.
- imgabe 11y agoIt's certainly not useless. It allows you to bring your bike right to where you live and you can avoid having to make an extra stop in the basement or somewhere else to store/retrieve your bike. Even when I've lived places with bike storage I kept my bike in my apartment. It's far more convenient and security even in an apartment garage is not perfect.
- Avalaxy 11y agoYea, like I said: elevators can be used for that. I take my race bike in the elevator up to the 21st floor every day and park it in my appartment.
- s73v3r 11y agoNot everyone wants to park their bike in a garage with everyone else.