A Brooklyn man who for years championed the idea of installing secured bicycle parking containers across the five boroughs said city officials iced him out of a deal to make his dream a reality.
Flatbush native Shabazz Stuart founded the company Oonee in 2017, which has since installed a handful of pods at transit hubs in New York City and New Jersey where cyclists can stash their bikes. The pods, which are free to use, are locked and can only be opened with a smartphone app.
Stuart has billed Oonee as a way to boost cycling in the city by allowing people to be more comfortable locking their bikes up in public without fearing they’ll be stolen. He has called for his pods to be installed in parking spaces across the city. The city transportation department contracted his company to install one of its pods in the Meatpacking District as part of a pilot program in 2022.
But on Monday, DOT officials said they would go in another direction. They announced the California-based company Tranzito as the city's preferred partner for installing up to 500 bike-parking pods. The city has not yet finalized its contract with the company and did not disclose how much money would be involved. Transportation officials cited Tranzito's experience installing bike parking systems near train stations in California.
Stuart on Tuesday said DOT officials never responded to a proposal he submitted last year for Oonee to oversee the rollout.
“We've never been interviewed,” Stuart said. “ This was always something that we sought to scale in New York City and in exchange for years, a decade actually, of advocacy and pilots and financial risks. We've been told to drop dead by the DOT.”
A rendering of one of the bike storage pods proposed by Tranzito.
DOT representatives disputed Stuart's allegation that Oonee was excluded from the process.
The city is required to have transparent bidding for most contracts and to score proposals from vendors on clearly defined metrics. DOT spokesperson Vincent Barone said for this contract those metrics included total costs, how a company would run the program, its track record and resources. Tranzito scored the highest based on these metrics, he said.
“NYC DOT’s goal was to search the globe for the best possible company with the experience and game plan to run a reliable and affordable secure bike parking at the nation’s largest scale,” Barone said in an email. “The agency followed the legally required procurement process — and the highest-scoring proposal was from a company that has 20 years of experience operating secure bike parking programs."
Representatives for Tranzito did not respond to a request for comment.
DOT officials said they eventually want to install the bike storage units across the city and will prioritize putting them near subway stations, along major bus routes and in dense areas where people might not have room in their apartments for a bicycle.
Jon Orcutt, a former DOT official and current advocacy director at the group Bike New York, said he was surprised that the city indicated it would not select Oonee: “Those guys really put the issue on the map here in the city."
Stuart said he’s weighing a formal protest of the process behind the evaluation. He argued that his company has on-the-ground experience in New York City and had partnered with a group that has already installed thousands of bike parking spots in London and Paris.
