Post from Ashlyn Spilis

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.