How Erie, Colorado’s Transportation Division uses BikeRackMap.com for strategic and tactical planning

By John Firouzi
Town of Erie
Transportation Division Manager

The Town of Erie, Colorado, is a small Front Range community of 40,000 people with a motto “Best Place to Raise a Family.” Like the Town, Erie’s municipal government is also small and focused on quality of life for its businesses, visitors, and constituents. The Transportation Division – a group of nine office and field staff – are responsive to input and seek meaningful partnerships that can help address details that matter the most to our community members. In 2024, I realized that bike racks are a small quality of life detail that is often overlooked. Fortunately, we have Matthew Logan, an Erie resident and cycling advocate who helped me discover BikeRackMap.com and made a case for bike parking as a necessary enhancement for the user experience at various local destinations.

Given that BikeRackMap.com provides the platform to share information with the cycling community, our team opted to leverage the tool and complete a town-wide audit of all local destinations to populate pictures, ratings, and map data to support cycling. Josh Mabis, a graduate student and summer intern in the Transportation Division, initiated the project by using Placer.ai to understand the local destinations and trip generation values for a data-driven approach. He then visited each destination to apply BikeRackMap.com’s location evaluation criteria, and add rack pictures, ratings and reviews into BikeRackMap.com to build-out Erie’s map.

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The audit has resulted in valuable information for the Town of Erie. We’re now aware of good design practices and understand the needs in our community. The Transportation team has plans to work through Economic Development, Parks and Recreation, and the Environmental Division to deliver improved bike racks at various town destinations. Additionally, the effort has resulted in a proposed update to bike parking codes through the Planning Division. Upon updating the code, the engineering standards will be revised by the Engineering Division. Along the way, I interacted with Craig Davis, BikeRackMap.com’s Founder, and learned about best practices related to cargo bikes, e-bikes, and bike rack visibility that can enhance the bike parking experience.

At the Town of Erie, we’re committed to supporting forward-thinking ideas and see strategic partnerships with organizations like BikeRackMap.com as the best way to achieve meaningful results.

Let us know your thoughts and comments below, and share this post with everyone who cares about bike parking.

3 Comments

  1. Sounds like a fantastic use of BikeRackMap.com! I am not familiar with Placer.ai. I wonder how it selects local destinations and trip generations. Anyway, great that a municipality is using BikeRackMap.com to improve the city–thanks.

  2. Sounds wonderful! Great service for the community that will most likely result in more good parking and more people using bikes for transportation.

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