How you get people out of cars: A bike parking facility in Tilburg is even more beautiful than their bus station

It even has moving sidewalks for bikes. This is how you get people out of cars.

After writing about a beautiful bus station in Tilburg, the Netherlands, designed by Cepezed, I noticed that they had designed an amazing bike storage facility as part of the public transportation hub. I asked for permission to publish the photos of it and they wrote back that they didn’t have any, since it had just started construction a few weeks ago. These were renderings! It’s amazing – these are getting so good that it’s hard to tell these days what’s real and what’s rendered. Also amazing is the attention given to bike storage as part of a public transportation strategy, in what is a relatively small city, the official municipality having a quarter of a million people.

One parking facility will be on the north side of the station and the other one the south side. Together, they will offer space for over 7000 bicycles. The northern parking facility has space for 3900 bicycles; [it] is the first one to be built and is expected to be ready in the summer of 2020. The southern parking facility on the side of the city center will have 3400 parking spots and will probably be finished by the end of 2021.

© Cepezed

Both parking facilities are equipped with conveyer belts and are permanently guarded. There will also be a service room for minor repairs and the parking facilities will accommodate around 200 OV (public transport) bikes. Travelers will be able to park their bikes for free the first 24 hours.

Really, moving sidewalks for bikes! This is how you get people out of cars.

Markham Parking Garage/ Wikipedia/CC BY 2.0

In North America, transportation agencies build vast parking garages for cars at commuter train stations, costing as much as $40,000 per space. In Ontario, Canada, the agency found that passengers live quite close; according to Oliver Moore in the Globe and Mail,

Some 13 per cent of them travel less than one kilometre to a GO rail station, and another 19 per cent come between one and two kilometres. But only 18 per cent of passengers arrive by foot, transit or bicycle, meaning that a large number of people are making short drives to the station.

That’s what happens when you give out “free” parking. Perhaps if they built bicycle parking facilities like Cepezed have designed for Tilburg, people wouldn’t have to drive half a mile to store their car all day.