Most of the people who live in Lillestrøm, a small town in Norway, commute to Oslo for work. That commute just got a lot easier: the Lillestrøm Train Station now has its own hotel for bicycles.
More fancy shed than Four Seasons, the Lillestrøm Bicycle Hotel lets commuters pay a small monthly fee to safely store bicycles indoors while they’re at work or out of town. Norwegian National Railways commissioned Oslo firm Various Architects to build it, but there are several other bike hotels throughout Norway. Lillestrøm just happens to boast the largest one yet; its hotel can sleep 400 bicycles at a time.
From the outside, the Lillestrøm Bicycle Hotel looks like a giant light box. A ramp runs diagonally up one side, leading to a public patch of greenery on the rooftop. “We thought it would be important to give back to the city the area we took away,” says Ibrahim Elhayawan, the partner at Various Architects who led the project.
That’s a generous sentiment given how many restrictions Elhayawan faced during planning and construction. Because the hotel is situated near a large commuter train station (which doubles as the Airport Express Station), the structure had to leave ample space on the sidewalk for passenger pickup and drop-off. It also had to sit 20 feet from the tracks, for obvious safety reasons. “It was very tight space to work with,” Elhayawan says. The architects dealt with those restrictions by building indoor bike racks that allow for stacking some bikes directly atop others.
Cute moniker aside, bicycle hotels are serious---and seriously useful---pieces of urban infrastructure. Like bike lanes and bike bridges, they make it easier for people to choose cycling over driving. That behavior makes cities healthier.
But they also go a step further, by protecting bicycles and the people who ride them. The Lillestrøm Bicycle Hotel, for instance, stays lit throughout the night---a crucial safety feature, especially for women cyclists. Using it costs 50 Krone ($7.16) per month. “That’s as much as two cans of Coke,” Elhayawan says. “And the salaries in Norway are quite high.” In other words: it’s a small price to pay for a healthier, safer commute.
