Cool bike parking in Tokyo

[johnridley]

$1/day, $18/month, secure automated parking, super compact, 23 seconds retrieval time. Very cool.
Tokyo's trying to reduce the masses of bikes locked to everything in sight, not so much on the theft issue, but this could solve a lot of problems in other cities.

Comments

[alicebentley]

When we first moved out here, I priced out how much it would cost to rent a warehouse-like space down by the ferry docks, thinking that might be a good place to offer bicycle parking/storage.

But the docks are so close to the major downtown shopping areas that commercial space is too expensive.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

In a thread about this video on BikeForums, someone who lived there a while described "the bicycle problem" - apparently the available parking areas are so crammed with bikes that they frequently get abandoned - bikes are so cheap that people sometimes just walk to the corner bike shop and buy another bike rather than try to find theirs in the sea of bikes. After a while there are hundreds of abandoned bikes in there.