Once upon a time, a red-head was biking home in the Charleston heat. She noticed a car slowing down beside her and thought, What is this crazy driver doing? When she did not respond, the driver whistled and yelled, “Hey — You hot?” She ignored him, thinking he was a random stranger hitting on her, only to realize that this “crazy driver” was her friend waving to her as he drove away. Oops!
Yelling my name would have helped… Oh well.
This funny story highlights an interesting way that people interact. It’s awkward for a person in a car to interact with a biker or a pedestrian or even another person in a car. When drivers do interact with anyone outside their car it’s either honking at someone or slowing down to yell out the window — usually inconvenient to others on the road. Drivers seem to be in their own little bubble while bikers and walkers have more freedom for face-to-face interaction. But even pedestrians ignore each other.
How do we get out of this mindset of “I’m-in-a-bubble-going-quickly-from-point-A-to-point-B-so-nobody-bother-me”?
I would argue for a less stressful and more efficient transportation system that includes all modes of transportation. Maybe then the mindset of commuters can be more friendly and open.
-Eileen Szwast
Eileen is a rising senior at the College of Charleston, with a major in Studio Art and minor in Environmental Studies
College of Charleston campus has lots of options of where you can park your bike. Guess how many bike racks we have on Main Campus, Harbor Walk, and the Avery Center? Over 200!
Yet some days it feels like you can never find a decent place to park because the bike racks are filled or a balky beach cruiser fell over taking up 5 spots.
I am looking at you, Bell South……….
Sometimes racks are being prevented from doing there duty.
I don’t know…..
Is that an iced coffee?
Caution: bike rack can’t rack
We are here to help you out! We have found all those bike racks that are hidden gems which people don’t realize are there.
Check out this sweet rack behind the New Science Building
If it is raining, keep your bike covered behind Berry Residence Hall.
You thought this was some weird art? No! This is the bike racks behind the Education Center!
Instead of following the crowd, park behind Robert Scotts Smalls instead of on Cougar Mall
Might not be the best view at Harbor Walk but there are bike racks in the loading dock area
Where ever you end up parking remember to make sure your bike is secure. Bike on my friends bike on.
-Eliza Bower
Eliza is a graduate of the College with a BA in Historic Preservation and Community Planning, and Art History, with a minor in Urban Planning.
One of my favorite T.V shows over the past couple of years has been Mad Men, a show whose intricate plot unfolds while following a set of characters working for an advertising agency in Manhattan. In one of the earlier seasons, the main protagonist Don Draper offers a bit of advice to a client saying, “If you don’t like what is being said, then change the conversation.” I like to think that one of the goals of sustainability is to change the questions that people are asking, to change the conversation. Instead of where do I shop, where is my food coming from? Instead of where I can I throw this away, can this be composted or recycled? Instead of where can I park, how can I get there?
Photo via Post & Courier
That last conversation is something that I am quite passionate about. As a cyclist, I am in favor of promoting not only cycling, but also other forms of public transportation. With the population in the Charleston area set to grow significantly over the next 25 years, dealing with how we are going to transport ourselves from one place to the other is going to be, if it isn’t already, a serious issue. And for a region that’s already cramped for space, adding more parking spaces and highway lanes isn’t the answer. Last night Gabe Klein, the former Director of Transportation Systems in Chicago and Washington D.C., gave his follow up presentation on his findings and suggestions for ways that Charleston can begin to address its growing transportation needs for the near, immediate, and distant future. His suggestions ranged in scope from bringing back sections of the old Charleston streetcar network (which used to be fairly extensive) to upgrading the city’s parking meters and raising the price of parking to increase revenues for other transportation initiatives.
In regards to my personal favorite mode of transit, biking, Klein mentioned that Charleston is in the “awkward adolescent stage” when it comes to commuting by bike, and I would definitely have to agree. There are enough cycling commuters to be noticed, but not enough of a mainstream cycling culture for cyclist to begin policing themselves to start following the rules of the road. Klein spoke of tensions that exist between different commuters and those who commute by different modes, and in Charleston, there is definitely a tension between drivers and cyclists. But these tensions are often artificial and are indicators of successful changes in transportation mode shares. A recent local example is the new bike parking available on King Street.
Hopefully many of Klein’s recommendations will come to pass. I realize there are barriers to accomplishing these goals, not the least of which is funding. Regardless, the fact that he was doing work in Charleston means that we’re beginning to realize that we don’t like what’s being said, and that we’re changing the conversation.
This week (Nov. 28- Dec. 2) we made sure all of our data was correct and went over our findings together as a group in order to make a presentation. We looked at our data sets that we found from the bike chalking, and talked about what these findings meant. We found that the bike racks by Bellsouth and the business center are largely used for storage, while the ones by Maybank/RSS were used more frequently and did not remain as long. Our group then put together a presentation during which we went over the procedures of both parts of our projects, and also how our findings contribute to sustainability on campus. Overall, we were all happy with the work we did, although we don’t have a final product yet (the GIS map is being worked on), we found out a lot about campus bike use through our findings and hopefully our data can be used in order to create a more sustainable future for bikers on CofC’s campus.
This week, all of us in the bike mapping group chose one of four high traffic areas on campus and began to chalk the tires on the bikes in one of the bike racks in that area. We planned on chalking the tires twice every day, once in the morning and once in the evening, for three days straight in order to get an idea of how many people were parking their bikes there for extended periods of time. Each time we chalked the tires, we recorded how many bikes were there, how many of those bikes were new since the last time we had checked, and made note if we noticed anything else that we felt was important.
It only took a couple minutes to do, but I had a really hard time remembering to do it while I was on campus. For that reason, I ended up with a few empty rows on my data table. I had the bike racks in front of the Bellsouth building and when I checked that morning, more than half of the bikes’ tires on the rack still had the chalk marks from Tuesday morning. So, it is clear that some students are storing their bikes there for, at least, days at a time. I think that these bikes probably belong to the students in the dorms across the street from the Bellsouth building. I lived in Berry last year, and I know a lot of the other girls who lived there kept their bikes, which they rarely rode, in those racks. This was because, unlike at McAlister, there were not any bike racks that were specifically for the Berry residents. The ones in front of Bellsouth were the closest, so we just ended up using those.
Today our group is going to begin working on the next phase of our project, creating a GIS map that shows the locations of all of the bike racks on campus. I am really surprised that something like this does not already exist somewhere. Hopefully students will make use of the map, so they can bike to campus without having to worry about whether or not they’re going to have a place to lock up their bike.
Well that was fun! Twice Thursday, and once on Friday, we had to bust out some ninja like moves as to not get caught with our tire marking!
Let me explain…We met up Thursday afternoon as a group and began the next phase of our project: tire marking. This was just a test of the real thing that will be happening later next week. The four of us were given two different colors of chalk, and a location where we think there is an over abundance of bikes that are not leaving. We buddied up, and off we went! We marked several racks of tires with our “morning” color, and took inventory of how many bikes were on the racks; this was repeated again that evening with our, you guessed it, “evening” color. However, it did rain which made the chalk wash off by the time we came back the next morning to repeat the process. Pretty annoying if you ask me.
Next week we will continue our markings; hopefully the rain stays away, and hopefully nobody tries to kill us for touching their bikes!
Okay, so CofC has tons of bike racks! It seems as though students are putting their bikes on the rack that is closest to whatever building they happen to be in at a given time. Why? My bike is usually across campus in a well “supervised” area where it is not getting scratched and tossed around because nobody ever parks there. When we walked around campus to map out the racks, I could not believe how many we found sitting empty or with 1 or 2 bikes on them. Ironically, other racks had every space full. I did not expect the racks near the dorm rooms to be as vacant as they were. For instance, College Lodge has around 13 bike racks, and probably 11 were empty. I guess students figure that if their bike is near lots of other bikes, then it has less of a chance of getting stolen. Maybe that’s true, but if the kids in the dorm start using the racks closest to them, it would free up plenty of space for others who live off campus and have to ride their bikes to campus.
Last week we started out initial mapping of bike locations on campus. I
believe it was the first time anyone in the group actually used the handheld GPS
devices to map location coordinates. I absolutely have more respect for the creators
of GIS layers, having only used the already generated layers in creating GIS maps. It
takes a lot of precise and careful work and I’m hoping this leads to really accurate
results. We have an awesome group of students that are ready to get this project
completed!
One of the major insights of the GIS mapping was the sheer number of racks
on campus. We have all seen the racks with bikes piled on top of each other on St.
Philip and Addlestone and I assumed that sight would be commonplace in our
mapping. The opposite was true. While we did see a couple of full racks, the
majority of our sights had an overabundance of bike storage available to students.
As a lack of bike storage is a common issue to students who bike to class, it is
unfathomable to me that storage locations haven’t already been mapped in order to
address these complaints. It seems to me that the campus does in fact have a ton of
storage locations, but these locations are absolutely useless if no one knows about
them.
The next step in our project is conducting an audit on the bike racks in order
to determine whether storage is needed strictly for students living on campus; these
findings are really going to help address College of Charleston’s bike storage issues.
I believe the completion of this project will have definite impacts for the use of
biking on campus by providing students a guide of storage locations, addressing
whether additional storage is needed, and most excitingly, contributing to the
development of a bike share program for the campus.
