A bike parking design competition for Puerto Rico

According to the designers, Ariana Hernández and Aixa Solá, Bench rack is a concept born from the need for street furniture to help maximize space and urban audiences”. The design concept works as a rack for bicycles, but also functions as bench seating in an urban public space.

Bench rack is just one of many entries in the website n-punto’s BiciRack design contest, which aims to raise the profile of cycling as a convenient mode of transportation in Puerto Rico. The site (in Spanish) points out that participants, including artists, architects, designers, and engineers, will develop design concepts for bicycle parking to be used in public spaces in the city. The best three entries will be chosen by a jury of design professionals, and will be built and installed permanently in 5 locations in Puerto Rico.

You can see all of the entries here, and vote for your favorites by liking them on the n-punto Facebook page.


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7 responses to “A bike parking design competition for Puerto Rico”

  1. Nicholas Hardrath Avatar

    As much as I love the concept I like the idea of the seating and bike parking being 2 separate pieces but close together. The 2 issues with this are A: grease will inevitably get on the “seating” part and cover someone’s clothes and B: gives thieves more area to use crowbars/tools to break locks.

  2. Mike Avatar
    Mike

    This was designed by someone who doesn’t know how to lock a bike. Better screenshot of the fail here: http://www.n-punto.com/bench-rack-26/br26_1/ . Even ignoring that issue, there’s nothing to lock the wheels to.

    Once again we have a designer with zero domain area knowledge who spent hours artfully rendering a design that 30 minutes of building a prototype out of PVC pipe and 10 minutes with a prospective user would have revealed the shortcomings of. What is it about bicycles that attracts these people like flies?

  3. James Thomas Avatar

    Yeah, locking to the headtube, or worse yet under the headtube, is definitely not ideal. If I were to use this rack, I would probably lock my bike to the side without benches and treat it like an inverted-U rack.

    1. Andy Avatar
      Andy

      Remove front wheel, slide forks out of lock, congrats on your free bike!

      Like most hybrid designs, it’s the worst of both things it has combined. You not only get a bike rack that you can’t sufficiently lock up a frame and wheel to, but you also get a lousy bench while squeezed between two dirty bikes while you can’t sit next to your friend.

  4. […] (Edit: and I see now that James posted about Ariana’s bench design, too.) […]

  5. jack Avatar

    That’s a pretty interesting idea. Would love if my city added something like this where I could sit and hook my bike to.

  6. […] modelo que mais chamou a nossa atenção é a criação de Ariana Hernández Aixa Solá que serve como paraciclo ou como banco de […]

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