No matter where you live, work, walk, or ride throughout the City, you must have noticed the recent installations of  many more bicycle parking racks on sidewalks everywhere.  The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition has made significant progress working with the SFMTA to make it much easier to request bike racks for specific sidewalk locations that you may particularly notice need more bike parking. 

While it’s FANTASTIC to see such progressive municipal cooperation in the name of expanding bicycle safety and ridership, am I the only one who’s getting tired of the utilitarian standard grey bike rack design?  Don’t get me wrong; they are clearly sleek, strong, and functional but I feel that a jazzier design would not only help further excite the population about cycling, but would also look way cooler! 

A recent trip up North to visit our Canadian neighbors in Vancouver presented a colorful and stylish alternative.  I walked up and down city streets for two days and could not even find two bicycle racks that looked alike!  Perhaps some criticism can be leveled at the apparent flimsiness of those triangles, but no doubt San Francisco’s intelligent creative artistic community can come up with some aesthetically pleasing marriage of form and function. 

H&R Block Bike Racks

Also, to the business-minded folks out there:  countless potential branding opportunities! 

More examples of bicycle rack awesomeness (and a locked up lawnmower) after the jump . . . 

I guess they would rust and change color faster, but that just makes them looker even radder! 

Lots of riffing on the “Triangles Hanging from Handlebars” theme 

And “Hoop Corkscrew” features prominently as well 

Whoa!  Someone actually parked a bike in that one!  That’s not all they parked, though: 

Previously: 

Murals of Vancouver Are Pretty Rad

Just saying.  Here’s one that pays proper homage to the city’s Asian heritage.  And crows, one of the smartest birds around [citation needed] and obvious heir of Tyrannosaurus Rex.  Look how majestic they perch!  Vancouver has the crows to thank for the city’s lack of pigeon epidemic.  Also:

They take their Commie shit very seriously

An epic standoff of purple proportions

I think this is the crow lady when she was younger

Bonus:  Urban farm!  With people working on it in the rain.  Vancouver is hardcore.

We’ve got plenty of murals in San Francisco.  We need more farms.  Case closed.

I was up in Vancouver for a couple of days for the Olympics, and this line was one of the longer in town. (Longest were the lines for public transit –  they were Toyko-crowded, but they moved fast.  OMG I simply cannot imagine Muni trying to deal with the Olympics.)

Anyway, more on the magic that are JAPADOGS here.