One aspect of Toronto bicycling infrastructure that has been extraordinarily successful has been the post and ring bike stands.
There are apparently over 17,000 of these scattered all over the city. The design is simple and attractive, and is instantly recognizable as a symbol of our city.
There was an issue a couple of years ago when it was discovered that these stands could be broken with a 2×4 and sufficient leverage, and the city is slowly rolling out a revised design.
You can phone to request post and rings free from the city. They are installed free, provided the placement meets certain guidelines. According to the article linked above, there is a backlog of about 1000 requests.
I just noticed this row of post and rings on the U of T Campus, on Russell St. I think that they have been there for about year or so, around the time that this section of sidewalk was reconfigured after some work on the sewers.
What is stupid about these is that they are too close to the wall to be really useful. Certainly they do not follow city guidelines that state that the rings oriented perpendicular to a wall should be placed 1.5 m away from the wall. You can barely fit one bike on each ring. If they were spaced differently, you could put two bikes on each ring, and thus have half the number of rings providing the same amount of bike parking. You can see some of the guidelines here:
Compare the placement to the rings that are visible in the background of the previous photo:
or these about two blocks away near New College that were put in around the same time:
or these around the corner on St. George by the Koffler Student Centre:
In this last photo, you can see that the post is far enough from the wall that it is easy to place a lock around any of the three main tubes of each bike frame.
