Here's my pal Maureen Bagge Fowler, the environmental engineer at Framingham State College, talking about cycluting to students. The [gently used] Cannon bike at right was raffled off during the second annual Bike Extravaganza.Our goal was to promote biking to the campus, located in Framingham, Mass. About 500 to 700 students, staff and faculty live less than 10 miles away and could easily bike to campus.
Maureen has been busy ordering bike racks and finding indoor storage for bikes on campus. Anyone can use the showers at the campus health facility, so that removes another barrier.
Another barrier is a lack of a bike. To remedy that, I collected 48 pre-owned bicycles from friends, associates, and through the help of the media. Doug Shepard, a dedicated cycluter who goes 27 miles each way to work regularly, contributed 13 of those bikes. Doug collected abandoned and neglected bikes and improved them.
Frank's Spoke 'N' Wheel [http://mysite.verizon.net/bizoesyh/westboro.html] provided expertise to fix up the gaggle of bikes as well as displayed a new commuter bike.
We sold all 48 bikes, some of which were from the the late 1960s and 1970s. Students preferred the odd colors the best, as well as the classic 3-speeds. The bikes that got the most bidding activity in our live auction had the best paint jobs- whether it was a 1980s bright yellow-ducky 10-speed or a modern mountain bike painted in purple and blue.
We made a lot of new bike owners. Maureen reports, "The bike racks are full." Our goal is to create a bike culture at Framingham State College, one cycluter at a time. The more people who do it, the more normal it is. I saw some people on bikes that day who hadn't ridden in 30 years. I hope they keep it up.
The final barrier is MENTAL. Most people just don't think about biking. They drive one-quarter of a mile to work, or drive a mile to a remote parking lot and wait for a shuttle to take them a mile to campus. This is nonsensical!
The Bike Extravaganza got them thinking and acting differently. Hopefully, the students will take their new habits with them when they graduate.
BTW- the beautiful Cannon moutain bike that was raffled off came from a local police department shed. It had been abandoned.
--not your typical cycluter
1 comments:
It was great to put all the bikes I had collected to use, many of them would have been scrapped. So it was multitasking, 1) not only did we start some new cycluters off, but 2) we kept some useable materials out of landfill, scrapmetal and 3) conserved the energy remaining in their organized form essentially staving off the natural increase in entropy. (i.e it takes eneryg to put raw materials into an organized form such as a bicycle, letting the materials return do disorder releases that energy to the environment, we kept that from happening, at least for the time being)
Bikechemist
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