A personal custom bike garage. But of course.

 

A guy in Portland, lacking a garage, has installed a bike storage unit in front of his house:

https://bikeportland.org/2025/03/14/is-this-bikehangar-a-residential-parking-solution-for-portland-393224

It's interesting. It's big. And it's expensive.

After watching the video (Pet peeve warning: the owner is a Millennial who uses terminal "up-speak," ending every sentence as if it's a question - UGH), I was saddened to find that my first thought was to look for a weak link in the design so you could steal the bikes inside.
My second thought was that bike thieves looking at this were also thinking the very same thing.

Previous bike locker designs have been installed in Portland, going back at least twenty years. Some were simply heavy fiberglass shells on a hinge that swung up and down. Thieves figured those out in a New York minute and a lot of them were destroyed beyond repair within the first three years.
Later lockers were large metal boxes. Stronger than fiberglass, but also easy to destroy with the right tools and the right mindset. (A guy lost his fancy bike in a Bay Area storage locker when the locker next to his was converted into a tiny meth lab, which exploded and destroyed the contents of the lockers on either side. The resulting fire melted his tires and plastic fixtures, bent the fork into a pretzel and baked the paint off the tubes.)

Bike lockers lost some of their appeal when the homelessness situation here reached crisis proportions about ten years ago. Desperate people were breaking into the lockers, emptying the contents and setting up house inside. In a few cases, when the locker's rightful renter came back, they were chased off by the homeless guy who'd moved in. Several of those lockers were subsequently removed.

At this point in our urban history, I can't see these lockers taking off here. Many cities -- including Portland -- are operating at huge budget deficits, unable to provide the most basic safety and health services. There aren't enough public defenders, there isn't enough jail space, there isn't enough affordable housing. Installing a bike locker that costs $5,000 seems rather tone-deaf, even if you install it on your front lawn. Maybe especially if you install it on your front lawn.

Also, while I understand that the UK-based designers tested them with everything but the kitchen sink, There are homeless guys in Portland using a sawz-all to cut through bike racks in order to steal bikes. Why wouldn't they try to blow up one of these to get at the bikes inside?

As my friend Sam Tracy used to say, "If they want your bike badly enough, they'll gank it no mater what."

Also, while I get that when you don't have a garage it's nice to be able to store your bikes securely without having to drag them into your house at night, I wonder at the unwitting message being conveyed by setting up one of these things right outside your house, next to the sidewalk. Yes, it's great to be able to have your bikes handy so you'll want to ride them more; but erecting a five-thousand-dollar structure for that purpose kind of screams privilege in a way that I'd rather not see when it comes to promoting a bicycle-centric way of life. I've hung my bike inside in the entryway of my house for over twenty years, and I know my house is a lot smaller than the one in the article.

I just can't see this making sense right now, when there are more pressing issues on the table.