New bike policy aims for safety

By Jocelyn Wright     9/17/09 7:00pm

With the largest student population Rice has ever seen on campus, a new bike policy, effective this semester, aims to keep pedestrians and bikers safe, Bicycle Safety Committee member Amy Kavalewitz said. The policy was orchestrated by the Bicycle Safety Committee, which consists of staff, faculty and student representatives, and now falls under the office of Vice President for Administration Kevin Kirby.

Under this new policy, bike registration is now mandatory, cyclists are required to announce when they are approaching pedestrians by either yelling or ringing a bell and bikers must obey all traffic laws, yield to pedestrians and lock their bicycles in racks. Riding is prohibited on covered walkways, and cyclists riding bicycles on sidewalks must maintain a slow speed. Cyclists are required to lock their bikes only to bike racks, and bikes not secured to racks will be ticketed or impounded.

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Furthermore, abandoned bicycles will be removed by the Rice University Police Department, which will also begin issuing citations to cyclists who fail to comply with the policy. The complete policy can be found online at rice.edu/bikesatrice.

Bicycle Safety Committee member Nicholas Muscara said he expects the new measures to be met with some disagreement.

"It's going to be a little controversial because we have to balance the interests of pedestrians and bicycle riders," Muscara, a Martel College junior, said. "There's no way everyone's going to be happy with every policy the university enacts, but we took surveys, got great responses and we really felt like we made a thoughtful effort to balance those interests together."

Kavalewitz, also an Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen Administrator, said the committee examined bike policies at other universities and solicited input from the Rice community with a survey last semester that received over 1,100 responses.

Muscara said he felt making bicycle registration mandatory was particularly important.

"I felt that's the best way to educate students about bike safety in general, and how to ride bikes at Rice," Muscara said. "If you have to register it, then you are given information and introduced to the rules and regulations."

When riders register their bikes, they are now required to take a quiz to ensure they understand the new policies.

Lovett College sophomore Isiana Rendon, who owns a bike, said she thought the quiz and bike registration were reasonable ideas, but that she was concerned about the rule requiring that bikes be locked only to racks.

Rendon said she rarely uses bike racks, often because they are filled to capacity, and instead prefers to lock the wheel of her bike to the rest of the bike and park it closer to the entrance of the building.

"There's not enough rack space for people's bikes," Rendon said. "Most buildings do have bike racks and they're in alright locations, but the main problem is that there's not enough space and so there's no way you could fit. Sometimes bikes have baskets or have really big handles and it's hard to take out your bike."

Sid Richardson College sophomore Jonathan Hsieh said the policy is annoying for him because he has a bike, though overall the new policy makes sense.

"I understand things like not biking under covered areas," Hsieh said. "I don't think it's too unreasonable."

The policy is the culmination of 18 months of work to update an old policy that was part of parking regulations, Kavalewitz said.

"The old policy didn't give attention to the complaints we were hearing from pedestrians and cyclists, so through a very diverse committee, we started to address these things," Kavalewitz said.

These issues included that of cyclists wanting more places to park their bikes and pedestrians annoyed by cyclists speeding by without following traffic laws.

Kavalewitz said the growing student body, coupled with a spike in gas prices, has led to a larger number of bicycles on campus.

Since Orientation Week, 260 bikes have been registered. Kavalewitz said it was difficult to know how many bikes were previously on campus as the number regularly fluctuates.

One reason there is no firm number of bikes on campus last year is that bicycle registration was not mandatory until the implementation of the new policy this year.

An informal count conducted last year estimated about 1,000 bikes on campus, Kavalewitz said. She added that hundreds of bicycles are also abandoned each year.

Kavalewitz said she was very concerned with ensuring that RUPD not ticket students until after they are made aware of the policy change. She said the policy was announced to the Student Association and the Graduate Student Association at the end of last semester.

The Bicycle Safety Committee has also started putting up posters in the residential colleges and other common areas and that brochures have been distributed during bicycle registration and at the transportation fair.

In addition, Kavalewitz said postcards would be put in all the students' campus mailboxes. Earlier this week, she sent out an e-mail on list-servs both at Rice and in the neighboring area to publicize the policy, since members of the community also bike through campus.

To see the full results of the bicycle safety survey, visit http://nimbus.cs.rice.edu/jk4/bikeSafety/.

To see what a few more students had to say about the bike policy, check out this graphic.

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