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[cap­tion id=“attachment_1130” align=“alignleft” width=“429” caption=“1) The ​“white bikes” pro­gram at Hoge Veluwe in the Nether­lands is con­sid­ered one of the first suc­cess­ful free bike pro­grams. 2)Vondelpark is Ams­ter­dam’s ​“Cen­tral Park,” but many more of it’s shady paths are acces­si­ble to vis­i­tors on bikes.”][/​caption]

I recent­ly heard Leslie (Koch, GIPEC Pres­i­dent) describe bikes as Gov­er­nors Island’s cur­rent ​“killer app.” That’s a per­fect way to describe the phe­nom­e­non we wit­nessed last year when about 35% of our vis­i­tors rode bikes on Trans­porta­tion Alter­na­tive’s Free Bike Fri­days (the over­all per­cent of vis­i­tors on bikes was a not-so-shab­by 20% ). Not only does the Island’s size, flat­ness, and car-free roads make bicy­cling an ide­al way to get around, but there’s also just some­thing about bik­ing here that appeals to peo­ple of all ages and ori­gins. They ride more slow­ly, they ride two and three abreast while chat­ting. They bike in san­dals and sun­dress­es instead of sneak­ers and span­dex. They stop to play minigolf. West 8 saw this oppor­tu­ni­ty dur­ing our ini­tial design com­pe­ti­tion and pro­posed a large fleet of cus­tom designed, icon­ic wood­en bicy­cles for vis­i­tors to ride for free.

But what does it mean to cre­ate a ​“car-free bike oasis” out here? Through­out this year, West 8 and GIPEC have been try­ing to answer that ques­tion. It’s more than just free bicy­cles. It’s even about more than just the widths of the paths. The chal­lenge is to under­stand the dif­fer­ences between how peo­ple would expe­ri­ence this new park on a bicy­cle ver­sus on foot. For­tu­nate­ly and not coin­ci­den­tal­ly, West 8 has thought a lot about this, and is very famil­iar with parks that see bicy­cle use sim­i­lar to Gov­er­nors Island. Their work on the Kröller Müller Muse­um Sculp­ture Gar­den , sit­u­at­ed in a nation­al park in the Nether­lands with a 20-year old free ​“white bike” pro­gram, taught them valu­able lessons about how peo­ple behave with free bikes. For exam­ple, West 8 is locat­ing the racks of free bicy­cles at the arrival plazas in places that would be most intu­itive for fam­i­lies rush­ing to catch the fer­ry to drop them off. The more con­ve­nient­ly locat­ed the return racks are, the few­er staff are need­ed to pick up stray bicycles. 

We’d love to hear what a ​“car-free bike oasis” means to you. We got great feed­back and ques­tions about the bicy­cle pro­gram dur­ing our update meet­ing with the GIA and the GIAC. What would you want to see there? What could you do here that you can’t do else­where in New York?