WHAT IS THIS? THIS IS A BIKE RACK.

For an object designed to disappear into the background, the bike rack is one of the most intentionally designed pieces of street furniture in the city.

The large hoop bike rack was born out of the 2008 City Racks Design Competition. As cycling began booming in New York City in the early 2000s, the Bloomberg administration launched the competition to design bike racks that were, quote, functional while simultaneously capturing the attention and imagination of New Yorkers.

The Standard Large Hoop Bike Rack — The Large Hoop, designed by Bettlelab, is an attempt to create a functional, but aesthetically pleasing bike rack.

Ten designs reached the final stage, but the top three were the O-Rack in third place, the Y-Rack in second place, and finally Bettlelab’s large hoop rack, which won the competition.

Third Place Design O-Rack — Ignacio Ciocchini designed the third place O-Rack.

Second Place Design Y-Rack — Andrew Lang and Harry Dobbs created the Y-Rack which came in second.

However, the large hoop is not the only rack you’ll see out in the wild. When the city installed Munimeters, machines that could manage multiple parking spaces at once, thousands of traditional parking meters were suddenly retired.

This created a new opportunity for more bike racks, and so the small hoop was born. It borrows the design of the large hoop, but resizes it so it can slide directly onto the now-available parking meter poles.

The Small Hoop Design — The Small Hoop bike rack reuses the concept of the Large Hoop, but adapts it to fit on existing parking meter poles.

And beyond those two designs, the city is still full of legacy racks and bike corrals from earlier eras.

Today, New York City has over 45,000 bike racks. And yet somehow, it still never feels like enough.