FSU Needs More Bike Lanes, Pronto

For the incoming freshmen, the confusion caused by an unfamiliar place is slowly beginning to fade into the periphery as the first week of classes draw to a close. In just this first week of fall semester, thousands of students have walked across campus: attempting to find their classes, the Union, their friends, or in some cases, the nearest bathroom. During peak time, FSU’s campus is absolutely crawling with students.

Meanwhile, there are a smaller number of students that eschew walking in favor of biking around campus. Whether it’s because they need to get somewhere in a hurry or they just love biking, there are quite a few student cyclists riding around campus each day.

Photo by Maxwell Dickey

The thing is, it’s beginning to look like Premium Rush out there. No, this does not mean we have a bunch of Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s riding around; rather, there have been tons of bike crashes and near-crashes lately. Because of how clogged the main walkways of FSU’s campus can get, it’s become increasingly difficult to navigate through the pedestrian minefield without having to resort to walking speed, negating the entire reason to ride.

Pedestrians will ask, “Why bike at those times if you know there’s going to be tons of people around?” Well, for some people, biking is a necessity because of the sheer size of FSU’s campus. As it takes even the fastest speed-walking students a good 20-25 minutes to get across, sometimes you’ve just got to find a better way when you have such small breaks in between classes. Admittedly, after the first couple of weeks, and people begin to acclimate to their schedules, biking across campus becomes less of a  bike-themed version of Temple Run, but there’s only so many times you can dodge those obstacles before you hit some oblivious texting kid. And besides, during peak times, the walkways become flooded no matter what point of the semester it is.

The university hasn’t done a miserable job trying to make FSU a bike-friendly campus. After all, there are parts of campus that do have bike lanes, but these paths are only on the main roads at the far edges of campus. With the way students in cars recklessly cut into oncoming traffic to speed by a bus that has stopped to pick up students, it’s no safer on the roads than it is in the middle of campus.

As for the idea of taking a bus instead of biking, to say the buses are inconsistent is an understatement if there ever was one. There’s probably very few students that haven’t approached a bus stop, checked their watch and noticed they’re actually a few minutes early, only to utter curses at the bus as it hurdles past them, ahead of schedule. The next bus will of course be late, giving an average wait time of half an hour.

But, here’s some good news. There’s actually a relatively quick and easy solution to this problem. The main campus walkway, made up of what would be Woodward Ave. and Call St. (meets at the Integration Statue) is the most pedestrian heavy area on campus. It’s a wide path suitable for both cyclists and pedestrians that cuts right through the middle of campus. All the university needs to do is block off the right or left side of these paths with some visible ‘bike lane’ markers. As can be seen in the photo, the path is already paved in such a way that a bike lane would be very easy to spot. Designated bike lanes would make it easier on both the cyclists and the pedestrians.

So there you have it, an easy solution to an annoying problem. Pedestrians would prefer not to have their elbows clipped as bikes rush past, and cyclists would prefer not to be flung over their handlebars as pedestrians meander aimlessly, zigzagging to-and-fro while looking at their phones.