WSJ story on bike lockers (including quotes from Charlotte)

Bike-Locker Makers Respond
Creatively to 9/11 Challenge
August 10, 2004; Page B1

Soon after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Tom Volk began hearing disturbing news from the nation's commuter-transit systems. Security officials were considering eliminating bicycle lockers at rail and bus stations because they feared terrorists might use them to hide a bomb.

As owner of American Bicycle Security Co. in Santa Paula, Calif., Mr. Volk made a living out of making opaque, 16-square-foot fiberglass lockers purchased by transit authorities to serve commuters who bicycle to stations, as well as by companies for use by their cycling employees. The problem was that a locker's primary design mission had always been to protect bikes from thieves, which meant concealing what was inside.

"You couldn't tell if a bike [in a locker] was worth $5 or $5,000," says Mr. Volk, whose 18-year-old company had $1.2 million in revenue last year. "The mission was out-of-sight, out-of-mind."

But as officials from the U.S. Federal Transit Administration descended on major transit hubs, they advised authorities to consider not only relocating lockers away from boarding areas but also finding a way to visually inspect inside lockers -- without opening them. Slowly word came back to Mr. Volk from cities ranging from Miami to Portland, Ore.: No view, no lockers.

How Mr. Volk and other locker makers redesigned their wares demonstrates a delicate balancing act of meeting new security demands without defeating a product's core function. It also is an example of how the events of Sept. 11 trickled down to some unlikely segments of American commerce -- and in this case, triggered a response that could defend against future terrorism.

Among the solutions from locker-makers: windows, side panels and portholes made of perforated steel or hard see-through plastic. The manufacturers also began advocating tighter control over who rents lockers and how. "We believe that every transit agency should be vigilant on how they give keys to users," says Richard Hartger, president of Cycle-Safe Inc. in Grand Rapids, Mich., which has been selling lockers for 25 years.


Some bike lockers now have tough plastic viewing windows so authorities can check out the contents.


In many ways, bicycle lockers are unusual for having weathered decades of public-locker backlash. The first test occurred after a bomb exploded at the main terminal of New York's LaGuardia Airport on Dec. 29, 1975, from inside a coin-operated locker designed for storage of luggage and other personal items. Eleven people were killed and more than 70 injured; the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey, which operates the airport, soon ripped out every public locker at LaGuardia, John F. Kennedy International and Newark Liberty International airports.

The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks provided another reason to remove luggage lockers, even though the FTA and the Department of Homeland Security don't specifically forbid lockers of any type. Many airports, such as Miami International, Washington Dulles International Airport and Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, as well as public-transit hubs including Grand Central Terminal in New York, no longer offer any lockers.

But at many major commuter train and bus arteries, such as in Portland and Washington, D.C., bike lockers still abound. That mostly is a function of municipalities' desire to promote cycling as an environment-friendly, traffic-reducing alternative to cars. "We have quite the cycling community," says Adam Argo, project planner for Oregon's TriMet Transportation District, which serves a population of 1.4 million and maintains 320 bike-locker spaces. "Riders want to use our transit system to get around with their bike and not need a car."

Rather than rip out and replace its old American Bicycle Security models, Mr. Argo's agency asked the company if it could retrofit them. To satisfy the request, Mr. Volk and his team resurrected an old ABS model with windows they had developed years earlier to little fanfare (or sales) to keep the homeless from using lockers for beds. Working from that, he retooled his machines and molds to produce a door with a hard-plastic window. TriMet then swapped out the doors on its ABS lockers. The transit agency also retrofitted other lockers from a rival manufacturer, Creative Pipe Inc. of Rancho Mirage, Calif., with either perforated stainless-steel doors or windows. Total cost of the overhaul for both brands: $50,000.

In Charlotte, N.C., where construction begins this fall on a new light-rail line, transit-planning officials crawled inside sample lockers from different makers and had police examine them from all angles for visibility before placing an initial order of 32 lockers from ABS. (The company's "Safety-View" feature adds about $750 to the typical $1,000 cost of a locker.) Charlotte security personnel also rejected a less-transparent prototype from another company that was favored by cycling advocates because police couldn't see the locker's contents from inside a patrol car.

"The perfect solution for us is a glass box," says Andy Mock, station design manager in Charlotte. "We set the ground rules early with bicycle advocacy groups that visibility was not negotiable in this day and age."

Meantime, at locker maker Creative Pipe, a staff of 50 worked around the clock for six weeks to develop a perforated steel mesh pattern that provided suitable visibility, without the holes being big enough to allow a thief or vandal to slip in a pair of cutters to snip through the mesh. They tried several patterns, snipping and reshaping until they arrived at the formula of 3/8-inch diameter holes staggered a half-inch apart.

"I had never put in a viewing window or sold a perforated steel locker prior to 9/11," says Creative Pipe owner Mark Pappas. Among his sales of such models, he says: 280 to San Francisco's transit system at a cost of about $1,200 to $1,600 a pop. At this point, "public welfare and safety is more important than whether a thief knows if a $3,000 or a $50 bike is in there," he says.

Not all makers think this is the best road to take. "Visibility is calling into question the quality of the unit," says Mr. Hartger, Cycle-Safe's president. "Someone can spray-paint the bike through the mesh [though he knows of no such incidents having been reported]. And there are issues of humidity and rainfall." Instead, his company is pushing tighter control over who rents lockers by encouraging transit authorities to collect more personal information, such as phone number, place of work, credit-card number and other data. Still, Mr. Hartger says his company will offer a locker-viewing solution for those who request it.

How bike lockers get rented differs by locale. At the Metro rail and bus system in Washington, D.C., cyclists pay $70 a year plus a $7 key deposit to use lockers, which are located at more than half the line's stations. In Portland, riders pay a one-time $50 fee for unlimited use of a locker, although because of high demand planners are experimenting with letting cyclists access lockers on a first-come, first-serve basis using their own padlock.

Meantime, ABS and Creative Pipe have developed electronic locks that they hope will leave an audit trail if something bad happens. On the Creative Pipe model, cyclists use cellphones to call a number listed on the locker; the call is then routed to an automated data center in Denver. Cyclists are asked to punch in the locker's ID and a credit-card number before being given a special key code to unlock the locker. "These have become a big deal after 9/11," says Creative Pipe's chief Mr. Pappas, "because in a lot of places where users supply their own lock, some guy could just throw a bomb in and lock it."

For the immediate future, however, locker visibility remains a main line of defense. Miami Dade Transit officials have plans for 198 lockers -- all with views -- along their rail and bus system, beginning with 10 near a downtown government center.

Visible lockers will account for 65% to 75% of Creative Pipe's total $2 million in locker sales this year, the company estimates. Mr. Volk of ABS says: "Visibility has allowed us to continue selling a product where it may not [have been] feasible if all we had was the traditional locker."

Even cyclists are starting to take it in stride. "It's better than not having lockers at all," muses Ellen Fletcher, a 75-year-old vice president of the Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition. Adds Herb Brown, chairman of Charlotte's Bicycle Advisory Committee: "We're hoping the lockers will be in high-enough population areas so that if a thief tries to break into a locker, someone will see them." Still, the 67-year-old won't be sticking his $3,800 Specialized-brand road bike into a see-through locker anytime soon. "Only my cheaper $800 Schwinn," he says.

Write to Gwendolyn Bounds at wendy.bounds@wsj.com