BU Bikes

Thanks to everyone who came to the Massbike Winter Commuting Workshop we hosted last Thursday, and thanks to Shane Jordan of Massbike for coming out to teach us about bike safety in the wintertime!

Here’s Shane teaching basic hand-signaling
and showing the importance of using blinkies at night:

In case you missed the workshop and still want to learn some tips about riding in the winter, check out these excellent articles on winter riding Shane put together on his own personal blog, Bostonbiker.org:

Winter Riding In Boston: Pre-Winter

Winter Riding In Boston: Winter Bicycle Maintenance

Winter Riding In Boston:Dealing With the Cold

Winter Riding In Boston: Riding in the Snow

Are You Prepared to Ride This Winter?

If you stopped by the GSU today you might have noticed BU Sustainability was celebrated the launch of their new website with cake, free mugs, and a Trek Hybrid bike giveaway from Landry’s. If you missed the giveaway, you can still enter the giveaway by signing up for the BU CarbonRally team.

You may have also noticed the awesome solar-panel equipped recumbent tricycle that one cyclist traveled across the country with. I didn’t get a chance to speak to the owner of the bike, but I’ll probably hunt him down at some point to talk about bike touring across the U.S., something I intend on doing in the future.

I must say I’m a huge fan of visual statistics, so I couldn’t help but notice how striking 5,500 tons of garbage would look like piled on marsh plaza:

or, being a huge science nerd, what a glorious light show you’d see from space if Marsh Plaza had 44 spotlights:

It was also great to see this sweet feature on Galen, one of our club’s co-founders, who still remains very dear to BU Bikes:

So far, the site not only looks great but offers some excellent resources and information on how to go about creating a more sustainable BU. And how will the website launch help create a more sustainable BU? The homepage stresses waste reduction, which is largely within the power of our aggregate individual behavior. And as an economist will tell you, the power of incentives is not to be underestimated, as incentives are what drives our behavior. If we’re really serious about becoming sustainable, we’ve got to start changing our behavior, just as the “It’s what you do” slogan on the Sustainability website implies. By showing everyone some solid numbers and displaying them in a way that’s easy for anyone to understand, and if enough people shift behaviors we could potentially see a dramatic shift in behavior. For instance, just over the course of last semester I had begun to notice more people carrying around those free BU Sustainability mugs on a daily basis, including myself. I will be interested to see what the correlation in the number of paper/plastic cups used on-campus over the next few years will be as I see more and more of those BU Sustainability mugs around. Biking makes the most sense in a city like Boston, and for a large group of people to be biking or walking instead of driving or taking a bus can make a difference.

Speaking of sustainability and powerful visual statistics, I’m reminded of two powerful demonstrations of sustainability in the urban setting. The first one is a photo I put together from PARK(ing) Day 2009, which BU Bikes organized right here on Comm. Ave last semester, where we gathered people and bikes together to transform a space normally occupied by empty cars:

The second is this photo along the same lines of space efficiency and urban sustainability, demonstrating the amount of space required to transport the same number of people by car, bus, or bicycle:

There’s no doubt in my mind that Sustainability will continue to be the hot topic it is now for ages to come. So I’ve showed you how bikes can take up much less space, but maybe you’re wondering the other ways in which biking is sustainable. For an answer to that I will direct you all to an excellent blog post featured on Bostonbiker last summer by Adam Pieniazek titled “Why I Bike,” who states simply that a bicycle is the “Giver of freedom, energy, and life.”

On my way to class today, I noticed something strange; there were spray painted bike lanes on the outbound section of Comm. Ave where there was previously no bike lane, which could only have meant one thing: The city has begun the process of putting down bike lanes from Kenmore Square to the Public Garden. About a block later, my suspicions were confirmed:

Hurray! I didn’t get a chance to check out the other direction yet to see if they had starting painting the left-side bike lane or any bike boxes yet, but I’ll report back here when I do.

Looks like the brothers of BU’s chapter of Pi Kappa Alpha are biking their pants off on the GSU plaza. Since noon today, these fraternity brothers will be taking turns biking on trainers during their 24-hour “bike-a-thon” to raise money for Crohn’s Disease research.

So stop by to donate or give them a high-five today, tonight, or 4am tomorrow morning.

We debuted our brand new wheel truing stand at this past Friday’s Tool Shop, which we held outdoors with other student groups for America Recycles Day. Here’s Peter Wilson (CAS ‘12) truing his front wheel with the guidance of our VP and bike mechanic Alex Boyd (CAS ‘11):

Bike parking in Warren Towers just got a whole lot more awesome. A snippet from the BU Today article:

“the University has converted a computer room at 504 Park Drive to an indoor parking space and appropriated 12 parking spots and a chunk of Kinko’s storage space to create the Warren Towers first floor facility.

From January to September this year, according to Officer Peter Shin, BU Police registered 120 bikes. Atherton’s office added at least another 92 bikes to that list since taking over in September.
”

So if you live in Warren and own a bike, do register your bike with Parking and Transportation/BUPD to gain card access to this sweet facility.

In case you haven’t noticed, there are a whole bunch of new bike racks outside the entrance to Warren Towers too. Parking and Transportation has done an excellent job

It’s great to see the University adapting to and accommodating for the sudden increase in cyclists in the past year, and how space that could previously only park 12 cars can now park 447 bikes. At this year’s Splash, I had no good answer for the incoming freshmen who asked me where to lock up their bike if they lived in Warren, but with the new racks in front and this new facility, I now have an excellent answer for the future. Hopefully BU will be able to keep up with bike parking in the coming years as well, so we’ll consistently see much less of this:

Check out this nifty visual time-lapse animation put together by BU OIT and BU P&T of the 134% increase in bike parking on BU’s Charles River Campus since September 2008.

[link]

Last Wednesday we participated in BU’s own Campus Sustainability Day in the GSU to show how bikes can be used for self sustainability. Not only did we promote biking as a form of self-sustainable transportation, we also demonstrated how pedaling a bike could be a source of electricity using the generator and car battery that geography professor Nathan Phillips uses to power all the electronics in his office. What happens when you plug a blender into this contraption? Why, bike-powered smoothies, of course! The perfect complement to the free coffee mugs Sustainability@BU was handing out right next to us.
Pedaling this bike was not only good exercise, but also delicious.

Last Friday, BU Sustainability hosted an event to promote awareness on climate change.  The event was held in collaboration with groups from around the world who are protesting the rising atmospheric carbon dioxide that’s choking our planet to death and raising global temperatures to dangerous levels.  The event took place ahead of the U.N. hosting a climate summit on a new treaty to curb global warming Dec. 10 in Copenhagen.

Of course, BU Bikes wanted to be a part of this awareness campaign, since biking is a zero-emission, low-impact, cheap, easy, and quick way to get around.  Especially in this city, full of transportation woes.

We formed the numbers 3-5-0, to signify the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that we need to achieve, parts per million.

You can see me, with the Jam Bike, at the bottom right of the “5,” and Tony and Greg are at the upper left corner of the “5.”  Then there’s Alex with a BMX bike in the “0″.

The Boston Globe published the photo (along with other photos from around the world)
the caption reads: Students and faculty from Boston University join together to form a 350 at Marsh Plaza, a special location on campus next to the School of Theology, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. received his doctoral education. The 350 global campaign calls for a reduction of atmospheric carbon dioxide to 350 parts per million (ppm).

Special thanks to Alyssa Benjamin for getting us on board with this, and to Dennis Carlberg and Susan Lebovitz from the Sustainability Department, and to the Environmental Student Organization for helping put this on, and to everyone who attended and help organize.

Seriously, we need to cut our emissions.  Otherwise it’s going to get ugly.