Parking Meters to Become Bike Racks

Back in January, the Department of Transportation announced it was planning on turning 12,000 defunct parking meter poles into bike racks. At last week’s CB14 meeting, where the DOT was on hand to discuss adding bike lanes to our area, Hayes Lord, director of the Bicycle Program at the DOT, confirmed that this would, at some point, be happening in Ditmas Park.

Since muni-meters have been installed just about everywhere in the neighborhood, the old metal meters are just sitting there, so this seems like a novel idea — they cut off the meter on the top and add a ring to the post, to which people can lock up their bikes. But there are quite a number of these defunct meters, many standing next to existing bike racks — would converting them all be overkill, or is there (or could there be) that much demand?