Survey of Valet Bike Parking for large campus events

Volunteer staff at MSU's VBP service.
MSU offered VBP services for a large event during late summer 2015 parking over 100 bikes out of 5,000 attendees. A combination of existing parking and temporary event parking eqpt. was used.

A survey was conducted by Tim Potter in early September 2015 to find out if and how universities are providing valet bike parking services for large events.

The survey itself is still open and is still accepting responses if you missed it earlier. Go here to participate.

Here are the live results.

Community VBP services for a large music festival
Scene during a large community music festival (E. Lansing, MI, summer 2015)

PBIC webinar “Pedestrian and Bicycle Safety on University Campuses”

Screenshot from webinar
Screenshot from webinar

Six of our MSU Bike Advisory Committee sat in on an excellent webinar titled “Pedestrian and Bicycle Safety on University Campuses”on October 16, 2015.  It was hosted by the Pedestrian and Bicycle Information Center (which is housed within the University of North Carolina Highway Safety Research Center) an excellent resource for all kinds of materials to help us make our campuses more bike friendly.

You can see the archived version here (both the Powerpoint and the audio recording):  http://www.pedbikeinfo.org/training/webinars_PBIC_LC_101615.cfm

Excellent examples from 3 universities (U of WI-Milwaukee,  UC- Berkeley, NCSU) that are doing some great work to make their campuses safer for everyone moving around.

Survey of University Bike-based Courier Services

Our dept. (Mich. State Univ. Sustainability/ MSU Bikes) is exploring the possibility of starting up a bike-based courier service on our campus to augment our campus mail services as well as other delivery services that currently operate on our campus, oftentimes using large motor vehicles for small packages that could be easily delivered via bike.  The photos below are of our pilot service which was launched earlier in 2014 for pick-ups and deliveries of Surplus/ Recycling materials.

This survey is to gather data on other universities that currently have bike-based courier services.

I’ll be sharing the results with the Campus Bike Programmer Network after the survey closes (approx. mid January, 2015).

http://goo.gl/forms/LysGVqJrZA

Thanks in advance for your participation.

Bicycle Resource Centers and the College Union – Webinar wrap-up

Joe Hayes, Asst. Director, Missouri Student Unions, has posted a recap of the recent (May 23rd) online/ phone discussion titled “Hot Topics Round-Table: Bicycle Resource Centers and the College Union” in The Commons of the Association of College Unions International website.  Participants quoted in the recap represented the following schools:   University of California–Davis, Bowdoin College, University of Missouri,  University of British Columbia,  Portland State University.  If you are interested in hearing more of the discussion, a video of the program is available here.

Bike-to-PSU-challenge banner graphic
Portland State University's 'Bike to PSU Challenge' graphic

Best Practices in Campus Bicycle Planning

One-way cycle track at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts
One-way cycle track at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts

Alta Planning, a leading consulting firm in N. America, published an excellent paper on best practices in campus bike facilities planning.  Take a look at the PDF report here.  Alta’s mission is to create active communities where bicycling and walking are safe, healthy, and fun.  Nice that university-related bike programming is growing as a subject of research.