What Moves You?

H.G. Wells once said, “when I see a man on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race”. If H.G. Wells suddenly showed up to the Lewis and Clark bike garage under the library this year he would not be feeling much despair because it seems like the number of bicycles on campus has increased exponentially. Bike parking, which used to be abundant, now is in short supply. The NSO bike ride this year attracted over 50 cyclists who formed the first LC “critical mass” of bikes that managed to “cork” (stop traffic) on Barbur Boulevard for a few exciting seconds of “bicycle power”, and for some a few seconds of confusion as to why we were biking through red lights. At the same time that bicycling seems to be taking over LC the number of people commuting by car is also growing.
The number of commuter parking passes sold on campus, people who drive only themselves to campus everyday, increased by about 2% last year from the year before (about 440 daily commuters each semester). Our progressive staff bought 8.2% more passes over the same time. So it would not seem like higher gas prices or Al Gore begging us to start confronting global warming seems to be having much of an effect on the number of people driving to Lewis and Clark everyday. Locating our school on top of a hill and the rainy weather certainly do not necessarily make bicycling the ideal mode of transportation. Cars are a great invention, they allow us to travel further and do things that 100 years ago would have been impossible yet how do we deal with our rising number of cars on campus and the need to address the causes of global warming? If we as a school are to seriously confront our carbon footprint more needs to be done so that the number of car commuters starts decreasing. Bicycling has to be at the forefront of this shift.
The Lewis and Clark community and especially those already on bikes need to do more to show that bicycling is the best transportation option. They need to help people see that while you can spend your time reading about society and environmental crisis if at the same time you isolate yourself in a car you are missing what it means to be a part of a community and what it means to engage yourself in your environment. Hidden behind car windows it is easier to drive by the homeless man on the corner and forget that our automobiles are responsible for one third of our carbon emissions or how the 5.7 million miles of paved highways in the US effect our environment. The result of this isolation is a culture which does not need to care what happens to the environment because in a car the majority of us are unaffected by the consequences we are creating.
Students need to be more involved in working with the school to create a free bike library and push for more funding for bike projects and other projects that promote alternatives to the commuter car. REED College has a bike loan program with paid bike mechanics and several other colleges offer free bikes to students who do not bring cars to campus. PSU has an active and subsidized Zipcar car loan program. The only reason these programs do not exist at Lewis and Clark is that people who want them are not involved in our transportation decisions. While H.G. Wells might be excited to see all the people biking around campus if he glanced over to the massive Griswold parking lot he would be horrified to find a growing number of people who have decided that commuting to school everyday by car is the best way to transport oneself.