Biking is a huge mobility supporter - it expands the 20 minute city vastly. Someone walking at two miles per hour can travel ⅔ of a mile, while someone biking at eight miles per hour can travel 2⅔ miles in their 20 minute city. This is why our development will provide covered, indoor bike parking for every single unit. We will also include covered outdoor parking for more bikes.
We are going to include enough indoor bike parking so that every single unit has at least one indoor bike parking spot. This is considered 'Class A' bike parking. We are also going to include a plethora of 'Class B' bike parking for additional bikes that residents may have. Our indoor bike parking will also have access to charging stations. We expect people to have ebikes, so we want them to be able to charge them without having to carry them up stairs.
We intend on providing e-cargo bikes on site. These bikes will make it trivial for families to go to the grocery store and pick up their necessities for the next week or two, then return them so someone else can borrow them for a similar purpose. These kinds of electric cargo bikes can be really expensive, but really transformative. These bikes will encourage tenants to not use their cars and rather use these electric cargo bikes to go to neighboring areas, reducing carbon emissions in general. We plan on keeping two Urban Arrow 2022 Family Performance bikes and three RadWagon 4 Electric Cargo bikes for this purpose.
We spoke to Ann Arbor resident, Erich Zachar, a father and nurse, to learn how biking has changed their viewpoint on the world:
The thing that I always think is, a car makes you apart from your community, and an eBike makes you a part of your community. Where a car for school drop-off, grocery runs, and errands tends to isolate you from your surroundings, an eBike invites you to participate in your surroundings. It forces you to take notice and experience things in ways that are impossible in the enclosed environment of a car.
It's a revelation, that such a basic chore like driving around to do errands can easily become a wonderful daily part of your life. And nothing will convince you of this until you experience it for yourself. A cargo bike share is a great way to make that happen!
We will have one parking spot per unit on site. Our parking lot will also be made of permeable, low energy, low impact pavement.
By ensuring that our parking lot is made of permeable pavement, we will lower our impact on the surrounding ecology and lower maintenance and capital cost.
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