|
The View from New York, By Ned GrothBicycles on CampusThe last time I was in The Hague, I took a photo of the parking area next to the Central Station, to show my wife back home. Not the car park—the bicycle park. Thousands and thousands of bicycles! You see, my wife and I prefer to ride on two wheels, not four, to get groceries, visit friends, go out for a Saturday excursion. That photo showed my spouse that people in The Netherlands, at least, are sane. We are definitely misfits in America. This culture worships cars. Children grow up here expecting to own a car as soon as they are old enough to get a driver’s license. Even our son—yes, we are pretty sure he is ours—insisted he would be a social outcast at college without a car. (We gave in, and bought him a car—we still aren’t sure how we failed in raising him.) Americans in general—not just our son—don’t “get it” yet about climate change. They don’t connect America’s role as the largest per capita CO2 producer with our car-centered transportation system, our preference for gas guzzling SUVs, our typical one-person-one-car travel pattern. Getting Americans to give up their freedom to drive anything, anywhere, any time will be one of the toughest challenges in reducing our global warming emissions. Because our son is such a “normal” American 20-year-old, an experiment now in progress on several college campuses here is all the more remarkable. Several colleges have decided to give each student a bicycle—instead of allowing them to bring their cars to campus. Our son’s college is unfortunately not one of them, but the University of New England in Massachusetts, Emory University in Atlanta, Ripon College in Wisconsin, Duke University in North Carolina, and several colleges in Southern California are providing bikes for students. Some of the schools have turned campus roads into bike paths. Stanford University, near San Francisco, is taking a different approach: They are paying students $250 a year to leave their car at home. At the University of New England, each entering freshman is given a brand new, $480 mountain bike, which students personalize by adding their names via decals. At Emory, Duke and several others, the university offers bikes that anyone can use, like the White Bikes of Amsterdam or Paris’s Vèlib’s. This recent, nationwide trend aims first to cut down on traffic, emissions and hazards on campuses, but it also has expanded the “college education” concept to teach an alternative lifestyle, one that not only eliminates driving from the dorm to the library, or to get a pizza, but also increases physical activity and fights obesity. While a few such programs have failed because of poor weather or mistreatment of the bikes, the idea is spreading to additional colleges. With luck, our son will encounter a bicycle-committed campus in graduate school. His parents still think it’s not too late for him to mend his energy-wasting ways. That’s my view from here in New York. For more information: New York Times: With Free Bikes, Challenging Car Culture on Campus Feel free to respond to this column at info@schuttelaar.nl. |
Ned Groth |
