by Elly Blue

“Nevada City, Calif., has got a fever — and the only cure is more bike corrals.

“Bike corrals are like supersized bike racks in a parking spot, usually on-street, which replace one or two car parking spaces with anywhere from four to 20 bike parking staples. They’re growing in popularity around the country (I wrote about them in a Bikenomics column a few months ago), but even I was surprised that bike advocates here had read about it and gotten excited.

“So at 8 a.m., with coffee and local strawberries in hand, we went for a walk around tiny, touristy downtown Nevada City with a delegation of transportation advocates, the city manager, and a traffic engineer from the next town over.

“We started out in the public parking lot outside the APPLE Center, a nonprofit sustainability resource center. “I’d like to have a bike corral here,” said the center’s director, Mali Dyck, indicating the parking spot near the door. It’s a little embarrassing, she says with a laugh, to have a sustainability resource center with no bike parking.”

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Elly Blue is a bicycle activist living in Portland, Oregon. She has been the managing editor of BikePortland.org, the lead coordinator of the Towards Carfree Cities conference in Portland in 2008, and has been an active bike funnist since 2005. She publishes a feminist bicycle zine called Taking the Lane.