What is the Mobility Hub?
The Mobility Hub
Sportworks and DezignLine® collaborated to design and create the Mobility Hub. The Mobility Hub offers short-term parking for different types of micro-mobility vehicles, including bicycles, scooters, electric bikes of many shapes and sizes, and share programs.
Sidewalk, curb space, and street parallel parking areas are highly valuable real estate locations; these are also the places where we have witnessed the highest amount of disorderly parking, which can impede both pedestrian and vehicle travel. Our goal was to develop an inclusive parking solution that will improve safe-street design, provide parking for many vehicle types, help integrate public and private transportation services to enhance small business accessibility and enable people to travel with ease through their communities.
The mobility hub idea came out of a local community meeting in Seattle led by the Seattle Department of Transportation to gather public input regarding bike and scooter share programs for 2020. We noticed that the scooter racks shown and discussed as part of these programs did not look very robust and would not accommodate a wide range of vehicle types. The lack of safe and versatile parking solutions is a significant limitation that could inhibit the further development of micro-mobility transportation. Scooter design is rapidly changing, ranging from upright scooters where the rider stands on the scooter, to scooters that look more like bicycles allowing the rider to sit on the vehicle. The popularity of e-bicycles has been growing exponentially. E-bicycles have specifically helped open up the market for cargo bikes. Some cargo bikes need a larger parking footprint than scooters. We believed we could develop a better solution that would work for a wide range of different types of bicycles, scooters, and e-bicycles.
The challenge was to incorporate the infrastructure needed to protect scooters, pedestrians, and bicyclists while keeping the right of way clear for moving traffic. The DezignLine BikeRail® and RailRibbon™ were the perfect solutions to provide protection. The combination of DezignLine products with Sportworks parking racks creates a mobility hub that boosts micro-mobility infrastructure and includes parking for various vehicle types.
What is the Mobility Hub?
The Mobility Hub is a streetside parking solution that incorporates micro-mobility vehicle parking racks and substantial steel barriers to create a protected parking location that will accommodate many different vehicle types, including bicycles, scooters, e-bicycles, bike share, and scooter share. The Mobility Hub comes in two configurations: Standard and Premium. The Standard Mobility Hub includes four highly visible short flex delineators and two highly visible tall flex delineators. The Premium Mobility Hub comes with four highly visible short flex delineators and with two DezignLine RailRibbon. The addition of highly visible delineators and/or RailRibbon increases the mobility hub's visibility and helps define its parking footprint.
Both the Standard and Premium versions of the Mobility hub include five Sportworks Cane Detectable Tofino No Scratch® Bicycle Racks for parking two vehicles each, mounted on rails, as well as the DezignLine BikeRail® steel barriers. We used the cane-detectable racks because the low crossbar provides secure and stable parking for a wide range of vehicles such as cargo bicycles, and has the added benefit of allowing people to lock upright scooters to the rack.
Benefits of the Mobility Hub
The DezignLine BikeRail® barriers are highly visible, easy to set up, and are a quick and secure way to create durable streetside parking. Combining these barriers with the Sportworks Cane Detectable Tofino No Scratch® Bicycle Racks creates a complete system for on-street parking that is visible to cars, easy for small businesses or local municipalities to deploy, and enhances the mobility of local communities by providing a parking solution to a wide range of vehicle types.
The Mobility Hub allows a business or municipality to take one streetside car parking space and turn it into a parking hub that will accommodate up to 10 micro-mobility vehicles. Converting one car parking spot into a parking hub for 10 micro-mobility vehicles increases the total parking available to boost foot traffic for businesses and helps make communities more bicycle and micro-mobility friendly.
Made of steel and able to withstand low-speed impact from automobile tires, the DezignLine BikeRail barriers and flex delineators make the Mobility Hub easily seen and protect parked vehicles in the hub. The Cane Detectable Tofino No Scratch® Bicycle Racks are highly secure and have integrated bumpers that protects vehicles from being scratched or dinged while being locked to the rack.
If you are looking for a solution to increase the amount of available parking or enhance the overall micro-mobility and safe-street infrastructure in your community, then the Mobility Hub is the perfect answer.