Installing a cycle shelter in your school makes excellent sense. Not only does it provide students with a secure place to lock up their bikes, but more importantly, it helps to encourage them to get active; and there’s a lot of advantage in that!

In fact, researchers from the University of Illinois found that children who exercised regularly had better developed brains than those who led more sedentary lives. In fact, in brain scans, it was revealed that the important part of their brains were as much as 12% more developed than their unfit counterparts.

How to Ensure You Get the Most from Your Cycle Compound

Obviously, getting a cycle shelter is an investment and like any other form of investment, it’s important to make sure that you get the most out of your money that you possibly can. Here’s a list of things you need to consider to ensure you get the best results from your purchase.

1) Think about where you’ll place it. To the untrained eye, tarmac seems like the ideal place to erect a cycle shelter. However, bolting to tarmac can actually be disastrous and end up costing you more money in the long-term. Quite simply, tarmac is not designed to hold things like cycle racks and over time, they’re likely to start wobbling or fall over. This is not only costly to fix, but can actually be a hazard to the students using it.

2) Rusting. When it comes to choosing the materials of your cycle shelter, it’s not a good idea to cut corners. Powder coating your frame will make it look more attractive, but don’t make the mistake of thinking that it will protect the metal underneath from the elements – it won’t. Without galvanising the steel framework first, it will rust. It is perfectly fine to powder coat over galvanised steel if you want a particular colour.

3) Ease of use. When creating your cycle compound, it’s tempting to try to cram as many racks as possible into the space that you have, in order to cater for as many students as possible. However, this can simply render the shelter unusable, deterring your pupils from bringing their bikes to school. Before you get in touch with the cycle compound manufacturing company, try to get an idea about how many students might want to use a cycle shelter. This will help you decide what size area you should devote to it.

4) Security. Bicycles are enticing items to opportunist thieves. As a result, it’s important to position your cycle shelter where it can be clearly seen at all times during the day. If it’s hidden away behind bushes or round the back of a storage building, it’s simply making things that much easier for the thieves to steal the bikes inside. And if your students think their bikes aren’t safe, they won’t bring them to school.

5) Storage. Remember that you also want your students to stay safe when cycling to school and that it’s important to actively encourage them to wear a helmet when travelling to and from the school premises each day. Expecting a student to carry a helmet around with them all day is unrealistic. Instead, think about creating a locker area where pupils can store bicycle equipment, or a secure room where they can safely leave it and pick it up at the end of the day.

Promoting the Cycle Shelter to Your Students

If your students are oblivious to the fact that there’s a cycle compound on-site, they simply won’t use it. When you get your shelter built, make sure that your pupils know it’s there and that they understand the benefits of using it on a regular basis.

If you want to get a cycle shelter for your school, simply get in touch with Canopies by Acer today. We’ll work with you to create a shelter that suits the space available and offers maximum benefits for your investment.