Day 159: Not Very Bike-Friendly

The parking garage across the street from CPCA has recently undergone some "improvements" that include locked pedestrian exit gates, automated kiosks, electronic card passes, and longer barriers for the entrance and exit ramps.

CPCA offers staff a monthly parking pass for this garage or a monthly Rapid Transit pass, which is quite a generous benefit for working in a downtown office.  Several CPCA staff, including me, are relatively regular bike commuters, and the parking garage has two decent-sized bike racks on the first level, near the entrance on 13th Street.

Unfortunately, the improvements may be beneficial to the operators of the garage (ACE Parking) and even possibly to drivers, but they aren't at all bike-friendly.  The locked pedestrian gates completely cut off one of the routes through which cyclists could enter the garage without encountering any car traffic.  And the new longer entry/exit barriers make it impossible to bike directly into the garage.  Instead, cyclists now have to dismount in order to lift their bikes onto a curb and wheel them to the bike racks.

I totally get that bike commuters don't generate any revenue for the garage operators, since using a bike rack is free, but I still find it very unfortunate and contrary to the other efforts the Sacto has made to become a more bike-friendly city to have these changes made to the garage that only serve to make life harder for cyclists.