Wednesday, October 18, 2017

Greenville City Council Inches Closer Towards Reinstalling Downtown Bike Racks... With Colors Intact!


Greenville City Council met Tuesday evening, and on the agenda was the the acceptance of the Safety Committee's report regarding recommendations on how to proceed regarding the bike racks that were removed from Broadway after over a year of use.

In its report, the committee recommended allowing the racks to be reinstalled on the conditions of Main Street Greenville (the non profit organization who crowd funded the bikes through community donations to begin with) submitting an acceptable "hold harmless" agreement to remove liability of damages or injury from the city, the seats be removed (as the committee believes they pose a safety hazard), and the racks all painted a uniform color (the committee recommended a "forest green" color).

Council member Todd Oliver agreed that the hold harmless agreement was needed and the seats should be removed, but discussed amending the report to remove the condition of changing the racks' colors as it is a "way too subjective of a decision" and that the colors that were there are "perfectly fine."

Mr. Oliver also suggested that the city bear the cost of reinstalling them correctly.

Following those suggestions, the rest of the council each voiced their support of leaving the colors as is (including additional reasons, such as people with vision problems not seeing a dark green or silver or grey rack well, which would create a new safety issue, the bright colors being proven to attract foot traffic to stores, and more), although the subject of funding the cost of the re-install was to be settled later, once the other conditions are met.

Council then accepted the report as amended to remove the stipulation regarding the color change. The next steps will be for Main Street Greenville to provide a hold harmless agreement to the city, who will then need to agree to accept it, then logistics of the re-installation will need to be settled, as well as the bikes being returned to the manufacturer to remove the seats and sent back to Greenville.

It should be noted that most members of council specifically noted the many voices they have heard recently regarding the issue, which I assume includes the 1,000+ signature petition that local residents assembled and delivered prior to the meeting. If you care about items like this, it is clear that it pays off to make your voice heard and to reach out to your elected representatives.

You can watch the entire council meeting from last night on the City's YouTube Channel. Embedded below is the meeting, beginning at the section relevant to the bike racks.


UPDATE:

In the meeting shown above, council memeber Tracy Tryon mentions having been surprised to see a bike rack like ours in the background of a recent episode of Criminal Minds. Because I'm obsessive over things like this, I found it...


Maybe you can't quite see it? Don't fret, I'll just have to...

ENHANCE!


See? These racks are everywhere, even if the one on tv has a seat and is a boring black color...

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