For students who have biked down 13th Avenue, reached Circle K and realized the bike lane ends, LiveMove, the university transportation and livability student group, may just solve your problem.
Students who are a part of LiveMove will receive an award for their plan to redevelop 13th Avenue on May 30 from the Oregon Chapter of the American Planning Association.
The lack of bike lanes in the city, especially on campus, makes traveling safely difficult for students who use biking as their main form of transportation.
“The 13th project we did was a concept plan to help improve the traffic and safety for 13th Avenue,” Alex Page, vice president of LiveMove, said. “It came about because we noticed lots of cyclists traveling the wrong way on 13th, many of them on the sidewalk.”
This issue was not being addressed by the city of Eugene or by the university. LiveMove took it into their own hands to develop a proposal to fix this problem.
The proposal contained research LiveMove conducted during the 2012-13 academic year.
LiveMove actively collected data regarding traffic on 13th Avenue, such as the quantity of cars that drove along 13th, how many parking spots were frequently used and how often students rode their bikes along 13th Avenue, in both directions.
In the end, LiveMove concluded that roughly 40 percent of students continued to bike westbound on 13th Avenue, regardless of the fact that the bike lane ended.
This concluded that bikers were either peddling down the wrong bike lane, or they were biking on the sidewalk.
After presenting their proposed redevelopment of 13th Avenue to the Eugene community, Susan and John Minor, parents of David Minor, a grad student who was involved in a fatal biking accident in 2008, wrote a letter to the mayor regarding this issue.
The Minors pledged $150,000 to support the project.
Page was excited about the project because he felt as though it would implement safer streets, and he was encouraged by the support he received from the community.
“The purpose was to give ourselves an applied project and put an idea out there for people to think about,” Page said. “The reception we received when we unveiled the proposal was very warm. Since then, it has gained a lot of traction with the community and city staff.”
Marc Schlossberg, the faculty advisor for LiveMove, was proud of all the hard work that went into this proposal.
Schlossberg was particularly vocal about students involved in this project that will be moving from Eugene in the upcoming year and will not have the opportunity to see the success of the project.
“They don’t have the same political agenda,” Schlossberg said. “Most of the students who worked on this won’t be living here when it’s designed, they are going to graduate and will be moving on. So, they are really giving something back to our larger community without having an extra vested interest.”
Schlossberg went on to speak about the long-term benefits of a project such as this.
“This project represents a long-term opportunity for the community and one that will receive considerable positive national attention for its design and the way the project came about,” Schlossberg said.
Briana Orr, bike program coordinator, expresses how impressed she is with the LiveMove members.
Orr is impressed that LiveMove members took time our of their own schedule to seek out the opportunity to correct problems they saw within the Eugene community.
“This OCAPA Award represents two years of hard work from LiveMove students and several key student leaders who ensured the 13th Ave conceptual design completion,” Orr said. “Not many students seek out their own opportunity to creatively correct the problems they see in the world and are so successful at doing so; they certainly deserve this recognition!”
The third public meeting with the community will be June 24 at the Knight Library at 5:30 p.m.