In this month's issue of Bicycling Magazine, editors conferred a dubious distinction on Atlanta: the worst big city in America in which to ride a bike.

The magazine, which claims a readership of 1.8 million, cited the city's dearth of bike lanes and lack of any official initiative to get people out of their cars and on to pedals.

It also mentioned Atlanta's bike racks. No, not that Atlanta has none, but that the ones it has are gathering dust in City Hall East.

"The rack situation sums up Atlanta's commitment to bikes -- plenty of resources, zero effort," the cover story states.

The story of the bike racks is emblematic of many things -- the broken promise of the Campbell administration, the stunted vision of city bureaucrats, the challenge facing mayor-elect Shirley Franklin.

Five years ago, the Atlanta Bicycle Campaign donated 120 bike racks to the city after the Olympic bike-parking project -- which was an initiative designed to accommodate cyclists during the Olympic games -- ended. The racks, worth $40,000, can hold more than 1,000 bikes. The city was supposed to redistribute the racks around town, at Turner Field, libraries and parks, among other places.

The idea is that more racks would mean more cyclists and fewer cars, which would mean less of the skyline-obscuring, asthma-inducing pollution that chokes the city every summer.

"In studies, bike racks are proven to generate more cycling," says Dennis Hoffarth, the executive director of Atlanta Bicycling Campaign. "Cyclists feel welcomed. People feel more accommodated."

By encouraging bicycling, the city also could have taken advantage of the influx of new residents who moved into Atlanta during the last five years to be closer to their jobs by getting them out of their cars, which then might have reduced traffic and lessened the wear on the city's patched-together roads.

But nothing was done.

At first, the city said it didn't have the money to distribute the racks and the planning department didn't want to use city employees to do the work, Hoffarth says, so Atlanta applied for federal money. When it finally completed the process to get money from the feds, Hoffarth says, the city decided it didn't want to deal with the federal red tape for such a small project and would use money from impact fees.

Now, the city faces a multimillion dollar budget shortfall; delivering bike racks around the city isn't exactly the top priority.

That's where Central Atlanta Progress comes in. It plans to take about 30 of the racks off the city's hands and install them around the downtown area.

"I believe we've cleared all the hurdles," says Glenn Baker, a loan executive with Central Atlanta Progress. "It's just a matter of getting a phone call from the commissioner's office to turn them loose."

Michael Dobbins, Atlanta's planning commissioner, says the parole of the bike racks is imminent.

"They probably ... should have been out there before now," he concedes. The city is trying to address its streetscape plans comprehensively, and the racks are part of the plan, he says. The private partnership with Central Atlanta Progress is what was needed.

That's great, but Atlanta has now spent five years staring into the mouth of a gift horse, unable -- or unwilling -- to do anything with a gift worth thousands of dollars, a donation that might have served as the impetus to begin changing the city's drive-first mentality.