Want my business? Install a bicycle rack!

The City of Charlottetown recently announced a program to incentivize local businesses to install bicycle racks:

The City of Charlottetown is offering a cost sharing incentive to provide local businesses an opportunity to install a bike rack at their establishment.

The four bike rack costs $425.00 plus HST, which would be cost shared at $212.50 plus HST each. Installation and maintenance costs for the lifetime of the bike rack would be the responsibility of the partner.

The City has capacity for twenty establishments to partner with for the 2019/20 budget year. Interested businesses can learn more or register online at: www.charlottetown.ca/cycling

I’ve been making a determined effort, this cycling season, to replace all my car trips with bicycle trips: where I used to go to the grocery store, pharmacy, hospital, hardware store, and the farmers’ market by car, I now take my bicycle.

As soon as I started to do this in earnest, I started to notice that there are some businesses with great bicycle parking infrastructure (Receiver Coffee Brass Shop, Upstreet, Murphy’s Parkdale Pharmacy, Sobeys) and some businesses with no place to park a bicycle at all.

The large bicycle rack at Sobeys on Allen Street.

The single best way to advocate for better bicycle infrastructure at local businesses is to ask them to take advantage of this program.

As part of the ask, make it clear that you’re doing so as a customer-who-cycles. This turns your request from an environmental decision into a business one: businesses want their customers to be happy, and they want patronage to be convenient. Looked at through that lens, spending $200 on a bicycle rack is a no-brainer.

Let’s get this program fully subscribed before the end of the month.