All right punks, let’s settle this once and for all. We all know the deal: I don’t like you and you don’t like me. I’m the Shark to your Jet, the Ali to your Frazier, the Spartan to your Persian warrior.
You walk to class. I bike to class. Along the way, we have it ingrained in our minds to despise each other.
I’d say hating bikers ranks high up there among favorite Terrapin pastimes — right behind rioting and saying awful things about a Duke athlete’s mother.
Hearing the profanities and feeling the occasional orange slices thrown our way while biking past, we bikers have learned to view this disdain as mutual.
You probably know the plight of the walker well. Students constantly suffer from bikers weaving around them, either surprising them from behind or seemingly charging toward them with a thirst for blood. The windy wake left by the biker renders people agitated and resentful.
From a walker’s perspective, you probably think we bikers have no souls for violently disrupting your morning walks. I’ll even admit, sometimes bikers do indeed disrupt the rules of the sidewalk.
Am I going to lie to you and say I haven’t accidentally hit someone near the kidney with a bike handle? No. But did the meandering girl on her cell phone, jumping into the line of fire have it coming? You bet your spokes she did.
Walkers, you need to realize your own limitations. Know how frustrated bikers feel when you blindly walk in front of our path. Stopping a bike’s momentum is much more annoying than stopping the momentum of your own two feet. Given the impossible amount of pedestrian traffic near campus hotspots, living here would make anyone want to stop biking.
At the same time, bikers need to reciprocate and adhere to safety and decency. The bike seat is not a pedestal.
When it comes to biking and walking on the campus, people have confused the right of way with the right to be an asshole.
So, we know where we stand: Bikers and walkers wish the other would go away.
No more.
“The Great Loh Push” to transform College Park into a top-20 college town should include drastic improvements to biking accessibility at the university. Instead of having bikers and walkers constantly agitate each other due to the limitations of the campus, let us love each other, as we should. The structure of the campus should not inhibit, but rather encourage biking.
If this university actually hopes to create a biker-friendly campus, it will need to change both the biker culture and, more importantly, improve campus infrastructure.
The $30,000 double-decker bike rack extravaganza near Mowatt Lane offers some hope, as does the construction of extensive bike storage and safety measures in the Metro parking garage.
But biking on this campus needs more than these considerations; it needs a reinvention.
On the college campuses considered the friendliest to bikers, the implementation of roundabouts has made a tremendous impact on encouraging biking and protecting walkers from danger at the same time.
At Stanford, for example, roundabouts at busy walker-biker intersections allow walkers to walk safely on the perimeter and bikers to ride along the interior. On our campus, hot spots around McKeldin Mall, Hornbake Plaza and Stamp Student Union are perfect opportunities to implement traffic-reducing roundabouts.
Besides construction possibilities, why not offer a bike sharing program on the campus for students who cannot afford or do not care to purchase their own bike?
In order to reduce the tension between bikers and walkers, it’ll take more than better manners. It will take initiatives to improve the status quo. In order to achieve our ambitions of making the campus more biker-friendly, the university needs to act creatively and ambitiously.
Nadav Karasov is a sophomore economics and psychology major. He can be reached at karasov@umdbk.com.