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NYC Mayor Mamdani proposes $25 million to build a network of 500 bike lockers
(nyc.streetsblog.org)
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this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2026
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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.
getting permits to place them is probably pretty expensive.
Some of it, I would hope, is also earmarked for future maintenance.
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.
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.
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.
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
Maybe these bike lockers are the final and most tangential piece of buildout for the new world trade center (2013).
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 $40/hr wage (could arguably be higher, depending on source), and a team of 8 people doing this for 8 hours a day, that's $2,560 a day for labour in total. Two isolate the area, keep the area clean, two drill holes in pavement and breaks up stuff so the boxes can get in there, two transport the materials, and two assemble.
So, assuming 4 boxes a day of $5,000 each, so it's now about $22,560 in total per day (wages included). Let's assume $22,500 here per day. 500 lockers divided by 4 (amount installed per day) then yields 125 days (4 months, 3 days) to install all of them. Thus, that's $2,812,500 in total.
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 (a balcony being about as big as one of those 3-bike boxes). So that's $250,000 in total for the permits.
We then end up with a total cost of 3,062,500, or let's call it 3,100,000. Because building often has additional hidden costs and maintenance, I'm assuming 1/3 extra, so it's even better when it turns out to cost less. Then we end up with about $4,000,000, or $0.45 per NYC inhabitant.
Even if wages were $250/hr, it'd end up costing only $36,000 a day total (labour+construction), and thus totals $4,750,000 (including permit). Hidden costs, delays and maintenance included, that's $6,175,000 in total, a fraction of the $25,000,000 that is claimed, with 6 months build time in total (the 2 extra months are part of this 'extra cost' if that happens).
This would mean all of the 500 boxes cost less than a dollar for all NYC inhabitants in total!
That while it gives much more freedom in the form of bicycles. There are no additional fuel costs, yearly checkups, and so on, and you get fitter and stronger, thus reducing your healthcare costs. Bikes literally make you richer.
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
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.
That's why most cities use the common 2 high open racks. They are more exposed to the elements but are more efficient (2 high), standardized and thus cheaper
US does love to go a different way always
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?
Design, Engineering, permits, installation, security,painting, maybe monitoring, it all adds up quite quickly. Costs can also cover maintenance and repairs for 5 years, warranty, it’s probably inflated a bit, but it’s not like these could be done properly and nicely for under 10k a piece.
But it’s more likely people are severely underestimating costs, it’s quite easy when your minimum wage is what, $9?
Yeah.
Assuming each site serves on average 100 bikes a day (which seems like a high estimate?) and that more budget would be needed for yearly maintenance costs... that's on the order of $1 for parking one's bike in a locker, each time.
Seems like a lot? Unless the parking sites are huge for $50k, and the per-bike cost goes down.
They have to be government approved and that eats up 30k per locker. Then it's a government job, that makes it 3 times as expensive