On social media, a new campaign is seeking to expose the conditions in which many Londoners are forced to store their bikes, at home or at work, while waiting for secure facilities to be made available. This movement reflects the difficulty of finding available and safe places for cyclists to store their bikes, in London as in any other major city.
From the toilet to the bedroom, on the balcony or in the bathtub, there are all kinds of unusual places to park your bike when you don't have access to a secure storage space or hangar outside your home, but none of them are ideal.
The #ThisisAwkward campaign on social media is highlighting the weirdest places Londoners are forced to store their bikes due to the shortage of available secure parking in the city.
More than 60,000 people are on the waiting list for a space in a secure bicycle hangar in London alone. It is therefore urgent to install new hangars in sufficient quantities if the authorities want, as they have previously expressed, to massively expand bicycle use in the city center.
Londoners who are unhappy with their bike storage set-up post photos of their poorly stored bikes on social networks, accompanied by the hashtag #ThisisAwkward. A poster campaign will be launched on Monday, March 28, 2022, showing some of these images on billboards installed in the districts of Islington and Southwark.
A residential bike hangar is a secure storage unit with enough space to park and store up to six bikes. It can be installed either on the street or in a housing estate.
