tight! one question though- why does it cost $50,000 to build a bike locker? guarantee someone with a welder could easily build 5 of them at that price and make a healthy profit.
Once you get past design, procurement rules, insurance, permitting, collaborating with all impacted parties, avoiding buried utilities, easements, paying project management fees, any environmental concerns, municipal capital work like that quickly becomes more expensive than you buying a shed from a hardware store and drilling some concrete anchors.
i’ll have to ask my bike if it cares how nice its house is. its kind of prissy but i still dont think it needs the $50,000 dollar box to go to sleep in.
Metal is expensive, but also they’ll be subject to considerable criticism from the opposing parties. The design needs to be solid, which means it adds cost. It needs to be pretty, it needs to last forever, and withstand significant abuse. So they’ll contract it out and that adds cost. And you couldn’t possibly reuse a design, oh. My. God. /s
The actual manufacturing I’m not sure about, but I assume the city won’t be interested in 50 contracts, so it’ll be a big shop with overhead, sales people, and steak dinners.
Government procurement is hard, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes stupid.
To install them, you need labour as well. Assuming a a $40/hr wage (could arguably be higher, depending on source), and a team of 8 people doing this, that’s $640 a day. Two isolate the area and get keep the area clean, two drill holes in pavement so the poles can get in there, two transport the materials, and two assemble.
So, assuming 4 boxes a day, that’s about $5640. Let’s assume $5500 here per day. In total, that’s $2,750,000 for 500 lockers.
But we’ll also need permits. The build plan needs to be assessed for transparency, environment, construction drawings, and the impact for the neighbourhood. It’s complicated but let’s say $500 per balcony-like area.
So, let’s add another $250,000 - so, it’s $3,000,000, or $6,000 per locker.
I doubt it’d cost $50,000, but then again, I’m not knowledgeable in this field.
alternate pitch: shipping containers can cost as little as 2000 including delivery. pay a psychopath with a with a welder ten grand to put some partitions and doors in the thing with scrap metal from the city dump. then spend the remaining 38k on handjobs for the building inspector!
You want something that is esthetically pleasant too, so you need to pay some designers/architects to chip in. Need security and resistance to the weather. All of that add up.
There’s this phenomenon called bike-shedding, about how because building a bike shedding looks simple, everyone thinks they know how to do it and feel that they to give feedback about it and the bike shedding is never built because of that.
Ownership of a private lot in NYC comes with a legal requirement to keep the public sidewalk in front of it clean and clear, but the city has complete say over any sidewalk fixture installations.
Paying 4 city workers to watch the 1 guy qualified to put the concrete anchors in. The other 4 are the driver, navigator, pylon guy, and hinge greaser.
tight! one question though- why does it cost $50,000 to build a bike locker? guarantee someone with a welder could easily build 5 of them at that price and make a healthy profit.
Once you get past design, procurement rules, insurance, permitting, collaborating with all impacted parties, avoiding buried utilities, easements, paying project management fees, any environmental concerns, municipal capital work like that quickly becomes more expensive than you buying a shed from a hardware store and drilling some concrete anchors.
i’ll have to ask my bike if it cares how nice its house is. its kind of prissy but i still dont think it needs the $50,000 dollar box to go to sleep in.
Metal is expensive, but also they’ll be subject to considerable criticism from the opposing parties. The design needs to be solid, which means it adds cost. It needs to be pretty, it needs to last forever, and withstand significant abuse. So they’ll contract it out and that adds cost. And you couldn’t possibly reuse a design, oh. My. God. /s
The actual manufacturing I’m not sure about, but I assume the city won’t be interested in 50 contracts, so it’ll be a big shop with overhead, sales people, and steak dinners.
Government procurement is hard, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes stupid.
Welding isn’t fast, each of those could easily take 40 hours of labor, and that’s on the low side for just an ugly box.
At $100 an hour, that’s 4k alone in just labor.
and 36k in materials?
Doubt it’s that expensive. A locker can be made for like $500. But then you’re thinking of sheds with a simple lock. If you want something actually safe, you’d need a bike garage, and those can go up to like $4k a piece., or $5k if we’re counting cargo bikes.
To install them, you need labour as well. Assuming a a $40/hr wage (could arguably be higher, depending on source), and a team of 8 people doing this, that’s $640 a day. Two isolate the area and get keep the area clean, two drill holes in pavement so the poles can get in there, two transport the materials, and two assemble.
So, assuming 4 boxes a day, that’s about $5640. Let’s assume $5500 here per day. In total, that’s $2,750,000 for 500 lockers.
But we’ll also need permits. The build plan needs to be assessed for transparency, environment, construction drawings, and the impact for the neighbourhood. It’s complicated but let’s say $500 per balcony-like area.
So, let’s add another $250,000 - so, it’s $3,000,000, or $6,000 per locker.
I doubt it’d cost $50,000, but then again, I’m not knowledgeable in this field.
alternate pitch: shipping containers can cost as little as 2000 including delivery. pay a psychopath with a with a welder ten grand to put some partitions and doors in the thing with scrap metal from the city dump. then spend the remaining 38k on handjobs for the building inspector!
This is excellent /theydidthemath and I appreciate it.
/theydidthemonstermath
You want something that is esthetically pleasant too, so you need to pay some designers/architects to chip in. Need security and resistance to the weather. All of that add up.
There’s this phenomenon called bike-shedding, about how because building a bike shedding looks simple, everyone thinks they know how to do it and feel that they to give feedback about it and the bike shedding is never built because of that.
Bike-shedding has a different meaning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality
I didn’t said that op was bike-shedding, I was just commenting on the term
getting permits to place them is probably pretty expensive.
Getting permits…. From a city office…. Which the mayor is a part of……
I dunno, I just have a feeling he could do something about that too.
in some places sidewalks are part of the buildings they border. dunno how ny does it but that has stopped a lot of projects.
Ownership of a private lot in NYC comes with a legal requirement to keep the public sidewalk in front of it clean and clear, but the city has complete say over any sidewalk fixture installations.
Paying 4 city workers to watch the 1 guy qualified to put the concrete anchors in. The other 4 are the driver, navigator, pylon guy, and hinge greaser.
Some of it, I would hope, is also earmarked for future maintenance.