A Weak Link in the Chain: Washing Bicycles

Published at 12:21 on 15 June 2014

It’s more environmentally responsible to use a bicycle than a motor vehicle. It’s also more environmentally responsible to live in multi-family attached housing rather than single-family detached housing.

If you ride a bicycle year-round, your bicycle will get very dirty if you ride it frequently in wet weather (and the weather is typically wet for much of the year in this part of the world). The onus to wash or at least rinse one’s bicycle frequently gets even more urgent if one lives in a cold-winter climate where the local authorities use road salt.

If you live in an apartment or a condo, odds are iffy that you will have access to a hose bibb. If you have no way to wash your bicycle yourself, you have no way to wash your bicycle. Unlike with automobiles, there are not (at least in the USA, at least in the vast majority of cities) businesses that offer bicycle-cleaning services.

This has actually been an issue for me at a number of points in my life. I’ve typically had to beg friends for permission to use their garden hose, and it means my winter bicycle gets far grimier than I’d like in between its infrequent washings.

I recently solved the problem for myself by purchasing a garden-hose adapter for my bathroom sink, which is conveniently located in front a window through which the hose may be routed while in use. But I shouldn’t have to do something that awkward, and such a solution is useless for those who live in large, multi-story buildings instead of a 4-plex like I presently do.

My apartment complex provides a sheltered bike rack (one they recently expanded). That’s nice, and it might even have been required by law. But such requirements are incomplete; they need to be paired with requirements for furnishing some facility for washing bicycles as well.

The regulatory burden of such, whatever it is, will be far less than the burden of existing regulations for minimum automobile parking facilities, and one could negate it completely by pairing the new regulation with a relaxing of the latter.

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