At SUNY-ESF, almost 1-in-4 students ride their bikes to class. About 5 percent of faculty and staff regularly bike on campus. For the college community, biking isn’t a leisurely activity, it’s a culture.

The Bicycle Safety Committee at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry works to strengthen the cycling culture on campus, and is currently working with numerous campus and community organizations. Committee members hope to reduce the number of bike-related injuries and make biking in areas frequented by students and faculty safer, said committee chair Melissa Fierke. The committee formed in January as a sub-committee of the Campus Climate Change Committee.

Fierke, who is an avid cyclist, formed the committee due to the results of a commuter survey the Office of Energy and Sustainability conducted last fall, as well as personal experiences, such as close calls with buses.

“That was really why the administration got behind me when I stepped up to say I wanted to form this,” Fierke said. “They were immediately receptive to everything.”

The survey found that 24 percent of ESF’s student population and 5 percent of faculty and staff members biked to campus regularly.

There have been 95 crashes in 2012 in the Syracuse area, with 10 being in the university area, Fierke said, adding that many comments in the survey indicated people did not ride their bikes as often as they would like because of fear.

Lindsay Perez, a graduate landscape architecture student at ESF, was one of the first people Fierke reached out to when forming the committee. Perez has been in a few bike accidents and is working with multiple community groups, such as Bike Euclid, to implement more infrastructure that reminds cyclists and motorists to be more aware of each other.

Perez said she hopes that someday, they can get together with the Bicycle Safety Committee or another organization.

“We want to carry on a mission, not start from square one again,” Perez said. “There just has to be a way to keep the ball rolling.”

Current efforts to make campus safer for cyclists include fighting policies that limit cyclists’ access to sidewalks around ESF’s campus, said Fierke, also an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental and Forest Biology.

The committee, which is open to ESF and Syracuse University faculty, staff, students and local community members, plans to organize bike safety events at student orientations, remove the curb by Illick Hall that makes it difficult to access ESF by bike this summer, work to create safer intersections and create a website that educates students about careful biking practices, she said.

Perez is working with Paul Mercurio, transportation planner for the city of Syracuse and an ESF alumnus, to implement more bike safety infrastructure.

Statistically, building more bike lanes almost always makes biking safer for communities, Mercurio said.

Mercurio said he is also looking to improve conditions around Comstock and Waverly avenues. He and his department are still looking into long-term solutions. In the short term, he said city officials are looking into creating specific bike lanes on the roads.

“The most effective thing is to take a good, hard look at our roads and make sure that they accommodate all users,” he said. “It’s about balance.”

Published on April 28, 2013 at 11:56 pm

Contact Shannon: smhazlit@syr.edu