Twice in the last week, we have biked as a family to a park on a bike path and have found that there is no place for us to park our bikes. Last weekend, we headed out the Minuteman bike path to an Arlington park (maybe at Hills Hill?). The park was obviously new and quite lovely (if bit too sunny) but there were no bike racks. Instead there were bikes leaning all along the fence next to the playground. Although the playground was obviously designed to be accessible by bike and a number of families utilize the bike path, whoever designed the park didn’t think of putting in any place for biking visitors to park.
Today we headed out to the Artesani park and spray pool (run by DCR), which is in Brighton along the Charles River bike path. We had a blast. The pool was lovely and the playground was fun. But again, there were absolutely no bike racks, although the park and pool were obviously being used by biking families. There were bikes locked to signposts, trees, or just unlocked.
Then we tried to think of playgrounds with bike racks. Cambridge has a lot, right? Well, our close parks like Rev. Williams (the Cedar St. park) don’t have them. The new-ish Cambridge Common park doesn’t have them, and that park always has a large collection of bikes parked along the fence.
Over the last decade that we’ve been riding bikes in the Boston area, bike racks have become more prevalent in all of the places that we ride, except parks. So, Arlington, Cambridge, and DCR, can we catch our parks up with the rest of our cities and start including some bike racks? More and more families are biking all the time, and we’d really like some place to park.
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All the parks you described were ‘new’ or ‘newish’ and yet no bike parking? That’s a bummer. We too get frustrated going to parks and such that don’t provide bike parking . One would think they would want to save the trees by proving bike racks instead! I mostly complain about grocery story bike parking on my blog, but I fee your pain!
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