Portable Bicycle Corral Design Competition Exhibition

Yerba Buena is a neighborhood in the midst of remarkable growth, and is home to the city’s highest concentration of museums and art galleries, thousands of residents, and unique shopping and dining experiences. With its thriving street life, packed cultural events calendar, and critical links to the waterfront and transit, there is a high demand for bicycle facilities in the neighborhood. Narrow sidewalks limit the number and distribution of bicycle racks in the neighborhood. Furthermore, demand for bicycle parking in certain locations may be very high for only one or two days a week, during just a few hours a day.

To address this need, the YBCBD in partnership with the San Francisco Planning Department Pavement to Parks Program, SPUR, SFMTA and SFBC sponsored this student competition to design a portable on-street bike corral that is easily deployed in the parking lane when needed. This concept blends the traditional onstreet bike corral idea with mobile openspace infrastructure like the Parkmobiles which are deployed throughout the YBCBD.

This exhibit presents both local and international design submissions for the Portable Bicycle Corral. The winning design will be unveiled in summer 2013, and will become an iconic movable fixture in the Yerba-Buena neighborhood. This new typology marks a new phase of urban design experimentation, and the San Francisco Pavement to Parks hopes to work with other design teams exhibited here to develop other prototypes.