Business owners create bike rack that's state of the arc
Downtown pair hopes 'bike arc' will promote urban elegance, parking convenience

Story by: Gennady Sheyner of Palol Alto Online
Friday, April 24, 2009

About a year ago, Jeff Selzer launched an ambitious crusade: to get the bicycles parked in downtown Palo Alto the respect they deserve.

While cars get their own parking lots and long stretches of space along the sidewalks, he noted, bicycles often have to rely on poles, trees and other improvised anchors to protect themselves from thieves. For Selzer, general manager of Palo Alto Bicycles on University Avenue, the status quo paints bikes in a rather undignified light.

"It just looks like a jumble of metal," Selzer said.

Early last year, Selzer teamed up with a local architect — and fellow University Avenue business owner — Joe Bellomo to design a new type of parking structure for bicycles. Bellomo, who specializes in eco-friendly architecture, got to work and, a few months later, the "bike arc" was born.

Though the bike arc now comes in five different designs, some of them going far beyond the "arc" concept, the most basic bike arc is exactly what the name implies. Shaped like a crescent, each arc supports an upright bicycle. The bike stands on an arc in diagonal alignment, with the front wheel pointing toward the sky. More advanced designs include the "umbrella" (a statuesque structure capable of sheltering up to eight arc-locked bikes under a canopy), a "half-arc" (much like a regular arc, but with an extended top that protects bikes from rain) and the "tube arc" (a series of individual bike arcs that form a tube and are capable of housing more than 60 bikes). And then there is the "house arc," a fully enclosed tube composed of bike arcs and other materials.

"Our goal was to come up with something that kind of separates organized bikes and gives them a place of honor, much like we've got with cars,"
Selzer said.

While businesses throughout Palo Alto and the nation at large — are struggling to stay afloat amid a recession, Selzer and Bellomo are optimistic about their invention. In fact, they hope the bike arcs could help spruce up downtown Palo Alto and make it a more attractive destination for potential consumers arriving on two wheels.

So far, Selzer said, the reception has been overwhelmingly positive. Plans are under way to include two half-arc structures in a renovated Lytton Plaza, a project spearheaded by a group of downtown business owners. And Selzer said he's been fielding calls from outside Palo Alto, including Michigan State University and a city in Southern California. Ultimately, Selzer and Bellomo hope to bring the new structures to supermarkets and to Silicon Valley companies with bike-friendly campuses.

The partners have also been talking to a manufacturer in Oregon who would build the structures.

Bellomo said he wanted to create a design that would allow the new structures to be built in a modular fashion, with few layers and easy-to-acquire materials. The bike arc, he said, is very easy for builders to understand.

The goals of the new design are two-fold, he said: to promote bicycling and to create a clean and elegant urban setting. The arc, he said, fulfills both.

"The genesis of the idea was based on how we can value the bike and have a light footprint in an urban environment,"
Bellomo said.