EDIT, 19th Jan 2022. I have just been told that the website ‘urban cycle parking’ doesn’t seem to exist any more. In the meantime, I’ve left the rest of the post, but the summary is that if you want to request on-street cycle parking in Newham, please email cycle.training@newham.gov.uk 
Officers are developing a new online map function where you can add suggestions, and once that’s live, I’ll rewrite this whole post.

Original post:

I have already written a (surprisingly evergreen) post some time ago about how to request a bike hangar to store your bicycle in. You can find that here with all the information you need.

(I should add here that demand for these has been so enormous that we currently have a huge waiting list for them. I mean, this is encouraging in lots of ways. But also depressing, of course. And I am as tired of talking about lack of money to do things as you are tired of hearing about it.  I have asked whether we could prioritise applications within the Low Traffic Neighbourhood as a way of encouraging and promoting behaviour change, but allocating resources to one area away from another is a difficult issue of fairness.)

I wanted to write another post though, about on-street bicycle parking. Not the hangars for residents, but the bicycle stands that you find, or want to find, at the places you visit. Outside the shops. By the station. By the leisure centre. At the park.

I am periodically contacted by people who request additional spaces to park their bikes, and of course I pass these on diligently. But I knew there must be a more efficient way. And lo and behold, there IS.

The excellent London Cycling Campaign, supported by Transport for London, runs a map where you can suggest places where parking might be useful. It passes all of this information to highways authorities (here, that’s Newham) and to TfL regularly. I was pointed to this map by officers, who also check it regularly to see where there is demand.

The map is online here: https://www.urbancycleparking.org.uk/

It’s a great place to leave those niggling thoughts you might have when you are looking for a place to safely lock your bike, and can’t find one, or the ones there are full, or at a place that you think you might visit if only there were a place to put your bike.

The LCC also points out that there is no complete map of bicycle parking provision across London, so is effectively crowd-sourcing one by allowing people to add the parking that they find to a second map, also available on the above link. I have to admit that I do love this kind of collective wisdom, and the way that the internet allows us to capture it to be shared. It feels both democratic and also faintly, pleasantly anarchic to populate a map together with anyone who has information and an internet connection. You may or may not feel the same, but even without participating you can still use the map, for example, if you are visiting somewhere and want to see if there is a good place to lock up your bike.

And of course, if you can’t or don’t want to use these maps for any reason, you can still email cycle.training@newham.gov.uk to request bicycle parking.

Enjoy!