Effectivity of campaign to make UCLA bike-friendly

UCLA’s got a new bike lane on Westwood Boulevard. This is a part of a campaign by UCLA Transportation to create a more bicycle-friendly campus. Currently many students feel that UCLA is difficult to navigate by bicycle. Reporter David Gauch explores how UCLA hopes to change this reputation among students and if their plans will effectively improve sustainable transportation options in the future.

TRANSCRIPT:

GAUCH: Recently, painted bike lanes were added to Westwood Boulevard starting at Le Conte Avenue on the edge of Westwood Village and ending at Charles E. Young Drive in the heart of south campus. This is an improvement for a campus that has not been known for its ease of bicycle use.

CHAO: Oh Yeah it’s terrible for bicycling.

GAUCH: That’s Gary Chao, second-year psychology and economics student. We talk as he walks his bike up the hill behind Royce Hall. He doesn’t particularly like riding on campus but often rides because he is late for class. Chao is not alone in his frustrations.

HOWE: I don’t think this campus is very bike-friendly because you have to go around the middle of campus and there’s just a lot of hills to climb.

GAUCH: And that was Grady Howe, third-year business economics student who bicycles to class from his apartment on Gayley Avenue. There are numerous reasons for students like Chao and Howe to find UCLA an unfriendly environment for bicycles. From the steep hills to the lack of clear bicycle lanes, to the Bruin Walk “dismount zone” which requires bicycles to dismount while on or crossing Bruin Walk. And that is only on campus. UCLA is bordered by some of the most trafficked roads in L.A. according to city reports. It is these types of detractors that have given UCLA a mediocre reputation from students as a bicycle-friendly campus. This is where I reach out to a UCLA administrator in the transportation department to defend the campus’ bike-ability, and well, I did reach out to Dave Karwaski who works with UCLA Transportation, and here’s the thing, he agrees that the campus is a difficult place to ride a bicycle.

KARWASKI: This is certainly an issue. This is the smallest campus in the UC system with the most people.

GAUCH: As the senior associate director of planning, policy and traffic systems at UCLA it is Karwaski’s job to create systems that promote safe routes around campus while pursuing greater sustainable transportation infrastructure. UCLA seeks to support a positive growth in bicycle ridership from students and faculty, says Karwaski. They collect data every year to track the percentage and total sum of bicycle ridership on campus.

KARWASKI: Bike riding at UCLA has tripled over the last 10 years–

GAUCH: From eight hundred to over three thousand students that bicycle on campus any given day. This data is published in UCLA’s Bicycle Master Plan every year beginning in 2006. Looking at the over 200 percent increase in total student bicycle growth over the last decade, it appears to clearly be a positive indicator for UCLA Transportation. But looking at the percentage of students bicycling rather than the total sum shows a different trend or rather a lack of a trend.

KARWASKI: We survey both students and employees each year and we get what we call mode-split which is a percentage of people using each particular mode. For students, its around 6 percent.

GAUCH: If you didn’t catch that currently 6 percent of UCLA students ride a bicycle. And here’s the problem with that, back in 2006 the percentage of students bicycling was also 6 percent, meaning that there has been a zero sum change in the last decade if we go by the percentages. The 200 percent increase in the total sum of bicycle ridership may be more attributed to the overall growth in enrollment rather than a significant shift in students transportation decisions. This raises the question of why hasn’t UCLA been able to grow its percentage of student bicyclists over the past decade? As Karwaski put it earlier.

KARWASKI: This is certainly an issue.

GAUCH: UCLA is different from other schools like UC Berkeley and UC Davis who have a much larger campus and can allot the space needed to create wide paths for cyclists and pedestrians

. KARWASKI: We have a plethora of urban canyons.

GAUCH: These tight spaces create a lot of modal interaction. Pedestrians, cars, delivery trucks, public transit buses and bicycles all have very close contact throughout much of campus.

KARWASKI: The whole focus is safety … and trying to get everyone to co-mingle well.

GAUCH: This is the strategy, to encourage safe co-mingling while also creating separation between the different modes of transportation when possible. For example, bicycle lanes like the recent addition on Westwood Boulevard create clear separation between bike space and car space allowing for easier routes to travel and improved safety. But is this enough to effectively improve sustainable transportation for bicycles on campus? Maybe not, at least according to Nate Holmes, an urban planning graduate student. Holmes see’s the idea of adopting a co-mingling strategy as the wrong approach to creating a model of sustainable and useful transportation options on campus.

HOLMES: UCLA tries to satisfy everybody. It tries to make it so that cars have access to the campus as well as bicycles and people walking. And as a result it’s not as good for walking and biking as it could be.

GAUCH: Holmes acknowledges that UCLA has improved bicycle infrastructure on campus in a lot of ways in the last decade from bike lanes to bike parking and bike maintenance stations. But for Holmes there’s still an important piece that is missing.

HOLMES: It is still too easy to make a rational economic decision to drive.

GAUCH: His example is that UCLA currently sells parking permits that are paid upfront for the entire academic quarter.

HOLMES: Which means that once you’ve paid for that you might as well drive every day. Whereas if they had a pricing system where you paid every time you went to campus that might incentivize people to make some other decisions. …Your casual people picking up your friend from class should not be able to drive right up to the footsteps of Royce Hall, which they currently can do.

GAUCH: For Holmes these are little things but they add up. In response, Karwaski agrees that cars should not be the priority on campus.

KARWASKI: If you’re driving on a college campus you shouldn’t be expecting a fast trip. There are many pedestrians and bicyclists and that’s how it should be.

GAUCH: Is UCLA close to achieving their goals of a comprehensive bicycle infrastructure? Karwaski is taking a long-term approach to this challenge.

KARWAKSI: If you look to some of the most progressive cities in the world and what they’ve done, were not there and we have a ways to go.

GAUCH: With a long-term approach in mind UCLA takes a small step toward improving sustainable transportation options with the shiny new bike lane on Westwood between Le Conte Avenue and Charles E Young Drive. For Daily Bruin Radio, I’m David Gauch.