March 2023 Newsletter | Terps for Bike Lanes

Hello Terp bicyclists and supporters! Thank you for being a part of our advocacy community at UMD. We wanted to give you all some updates on what has been going on with the club and the effort to improve bicycle infrastructure at UMD. We hope to make these newsletters a regular part of our communication, so look out for them in your inbox! Also, checkout the links at https://terps4bikelanes.me/ and share with any friends who’d like to see bike-lanes at UMD.

Petition

If you haven’t yet, please sign our petition to support separate micromobility infrastructure, e.g. bike lanes, at UMD. The higher our numbers on this petition, the larger our voice is when we speak with the Department of Transportation and Facilities Management. Also, don’t hesitate to share this petition with your friends, neighbors, colleagues, and classmates.

Prince George’s County US Route 1 Land Redevelopment Study: Community Stakeholder Meeting

Date: Wednesday, March 15 2023
Time: 4:00pm – 5:30pm Open house informal session
6:30pm – 8:00pm Community meeting presentation
Where: Beltsville Community Center
Signup here

There are continuous, separated bikeways from the edge of campus all the way to the community center where the meeting is being held. Members of our group will be riding their bikes to this meeting to show the county that we care about biking infrastructure. If you would like to ride along, reach out to John at jevans96@umd.edu to work out a meeting place and time.

DOTS Meeting Debrief

Members of the executive board met with Marta Woldu and Aysha Cohen from DOTS on Monday, February 20th. It was a good conversation about the status of current bike infrastructure projects on campus and the direction of future projects. They let us know that the bike-way feasibility studies that they were given funding for last fall are finishing up their planning stages. DOTS plans to make an announcement about the studies in the coming weeks. From what they showed us, the proposed bike lanes would create a substantial bike lane network through campus when combined with the lanes that will run in parallel with the Purple Line. We also discussed the possibility of adding pop-up lanes to campus, a strategy which had not been previously considered by either DOTS or the Tiger Team. They were particularly receptive to the idea of making the section of Regents Drive in front of the Regents Drive Garage a one-way road going south and turning the northbound lane into a two-way bikeway. You can learn a bit more about the project as we’ve proposed it here. We’ve also earned the support for this project from the Transportation and Infrastructure committee of the SGA. The committee intends to bring a bill for supporting this initiative to the SGA at large as soon as the proposal is workshopped completely.

Crash Reporting

DOTS has a crash reporting form for any crashes that occur on campus so that they can have a better understanding of the current road safety at UMD. We implore you to fill out this form if you have been involved in a crash because this information can be an important metric in determining the need for bike lanes on campus. A link to this form is also available on our website at https://terps4bikelanes.me, so it can be easy to find in the future.

Projects for New Members

This is an advocacy group, and we need more active members to help us convince the university that they need to add bike lanes and other infrastructure. There have been many good ideas for events and other projects brought up, but we need people to take charge to help us realize them. Managing a project like one of these is leadership experience and would likely be a great résumé item.

Work with one or more of UMD’s law professors to write to the university about MD. Transportation Code Ann. § 21-1202 (2021) and UMD’s stance that all off-road cycling and micromobility usage is illegal.
Plan a protest bike ride to show the university how unreasonable the current infrastructure is.
College Park is soon getting its first Capital Bikeshare station! The university has an option for students to apply for a sustainability grant. Investigate whether or not it can be used for a station on campus, and if it can be, write a grant proposal.
Very few roads on campus have been measured for daily car traffic. Put a team together to do manual counts so that we can have an accurate description of campus traffic.
A bike parade would be a great opportunity to get students excited about riding bikes in a safe environment. Work with DOTS to plan a bike parade. DOTS will likely sponsor, but we need students to manage the event.
While we have plans for some pop-up bike lanes and DOTS is working on feasibility studies for some permanent ones, there are many areas of campus that have potential for bikeways, but there are no designs. Work with students and/or professors in urban planning to design bikeways for areas such as Mckeldin Mall, Chapel Lawn, and the area in front of Martin Hall.
Are you a digital artist? Our logo could use an update and we need more digital assets such as a favicon for our website.
The Diamondback accepts op-eds written by anyone in the campus community. Work alone or with others to write op-eds to help further the cause!

These are just a few examples that have been suggested, but this list is by no means exhaustive. If you have an idea that you want to try, then join our Slack and propose it!