Letter to the editor
The administration should create bike paths on campus.
Biking is the fastest way to get to class at USC. Many of us bike down Ellendale Place, turn left on Jefferson Boulevard and bike across the intersection at McClintock Avenue. Do you wonder if there are police waiting to give you a ticket for riding your bike? Well, you shouldn’t, because you are doing nothing wrong.
Instead of banning bikes at USC, the university should focus its time and resources on regulating congested intersections.
So many USC students bike because it is a safe, quick, easy and inexpensive way for students to navigate to, from and around USC’s campus. USC should install more bike racks and paved bike paths on campus to further promote students getting to class on time while engaging in athletic activity.
If sufficient, safe and considerate accommodations were made for bikers, they would use them instead of taking over sidewalks and intersections and making them unsafe for pedestrians. But because so many USC students bike to class, pedestrians have to dodge speeding bikes everywhere. Even though DPS has set up safe zones in areas where bicycle and pedestrian traffic is heavy, these zones only divert congestion to less crowded areas. They also slow down students and aren’t always enforced.
It’s not fair to students when people can ignore the safety zones, not walk their bikes — or skateboards — and peddle by fast enough to get away with it. Most bikers try to use alternate paths to divert these safe zones (i.e. cutting through parking lots).
Some argue that USC’s longstanding bike problem won’t go away unless bikes vanish completely. If bicycles were banned from USC’s campus there would be no more weaving through pedestrians, dodging safe zones or messy collisions.
Though banning bikes might solve USC’s bike problems, it would also create many more problems for students. I live far from campus and biking is the most realistic and logical way for me to get to school on time on a daily basis. Driving to school would take twice as long, parking would be expensive and it’s not the most eco-friendly means of transportation.
USC needs to create paths and bike racks for bikers instead of finding ways to take away the privilege completely. If there were designated paved bike paths separate from walkways, there would be less danger, traffic and congestion on campus.
Kendall Bullock
Junior, communication