Wesleying received this friendly PSA about bike parking from Physical Plant and Wesleyan Students for Disability Rights. If you have suggestions, note that you should “feel free to comment on this post”:
Have you been ticketed?
If you’ve received a purple ticket like this one, your bike is inappropriately locked. This tag will serve as a warning from Physical Plant. By locking your bike to a railing, light pole, sign post, or tree you are impeding pedestrian travel and damaging poles, posts, and trees. In addition you may be making stairs or walkways inaccessible to members of our community who require these railings to get around campus. If your bike is found attached to anything besides a bike rack, it will be removed and stored at Physical Plant.
We are also looking for suggestions of locations for additional bike racks. We want to have enough bike racks available in high-traffic areas so that it is not necessary to lock bikes to railings and poles. Feel free to comment on this post or send us an email.
If you have any questions, please call Jeff Sweet of Physical Plant at (860) 685-3763 or email wesdisabilityrights(at)gmail(dot)com. This is a combined campaign of Physical Plant and Wesleyan Students for Disability Rights.
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This isn’t even the tip of the iceberg with problems of bike accessibility on campus. There are far too few bike racks at public places as well as student residences, which is why so many students have to resort to locking their bikes to non-bike-rack features. Additionally, the fact that PPlant thinks it’s a good idea to break people’s locks (which can cost upward of $75) is absurd.
There is also the issue that many students do not understand how to safely secure their bike – I see so many bikes around campus locked with a shitty cable lock through only the frame or one of the wheels. This is a recipe for your bike (or parts of it) getting stolen, especially if you have quick release wheels and seatpost.
Instead of wasting time and resources sequestering people’s bikes, PPlant should take a few minutes to post signs at bike racks and places where bikes are commonly locked informing students of proper locking procedures – both location and method of locking.
There should be a bike rack in the butts courtyard near summerfields, but not over that grassy hill you have to climb. When I bike to summies it’s inconvenient to push my bike to a bike rack.
so im glad im spending 50K for these guys to unlock our bikes and send them in a very inconvenient part of campus that i can no longer bike to… hey instead why don’t we allow bikes to be placed wherever we want, fire one of these physical planet workers and use his/her paycheck to pay for a student to study here… i should be president
Suggestion: Add more bike racks to campus BEFORE punishing people for not using them.
Also, I feel like it would have been nice to make a clear distinction between locking bikes in places that do impede access for others or otherwise cause problems (access ramps, trees) and places that don’t (poles, signposts).
wow, fuck that.