Bikes on Buses!!!

Starting this semester students and staff living on Tiger Transit routes will be able to bring their bikes to campus on the bus. Many students complain that they can’t ride their bikes to campus because there aren’t bike paths and their routes include streets with dangerous traffic, especially College Street and Wire Road. The campus planning office, the campus bike committee, and the office of the Assistant VP for Auxiliary Services have worked together to make this happen.

Bikes on buses are a common sight in many American cities and on campuses across the country. The bike racks are mounted on the front of the bus and after a person gets the hang of it, it takes less than a minute to load the bike onto the rack. Each rack will hold two bikes. There are instructions for loading and unloading your bike online. Also look for the demonstration rack which will be installed on the Haley Center concourse soon.

As the campus moves toward a multi-modal transportation system, bikes on buses will be an important addition. This innovation will send a message to bike riders that the campus is thinking about them. It’s an important statement about reducing the number of SOVs (single-occupancy vehicles) brought to campus.

In case you haven’t noticed, next time you’re on Thach Concourse, look for the signs that tell bikes to yield to pedestrians. They are just the first step in a bigger program to improve the bike etiquette on campus.

Auburn Sustainability Action Project

Spring semester 2006, thanks to a challenge by College of Liberal Arts Dean Anne Gramberg, Lindy Biggs experimented with a new kind of class, one that gets students thinking about sustainability and designing campus projects to display what they’ve learned. Thirteen students divided into two teams. One team designed a green roof, which will be installed at Haley Center this fall, the other completed an ecological footprint of Spidle Hall.

Sustainability Initiative Interns

Last year the Sustainability Initiative was able to support three interns: Nurmastini Bujang Nickman, a PhD student in entomology, Nicodemus Bernard, an M.A. student in Industrial Design, and Shelby Spears, an undergraduate student in Graphic Design.

We are now accepting applications for three undergraduate interns and one graduate intern for Fall 2006. If you know any students who would be good candidates, please encourage them to apply.

2005-2006 Internship Highlights

Tini focused on the use of Integrated Pest Management (IPM) strategies compared to conventional perimeter spraying around buildings on campus to control smokybrown roaches. Conventional perimeter spraying is deleterious to beneficial, non-target insects (e.g. spiders) as well as harmful to humans. Tini worked to achieve a greater control of smokybrown roaches while using only a minimal amount of carefully applied non-toxic insecticide.

Nic created a prototype label that rates the life cycle sustainability of products to make it easier for users to compare products and to examine their impact at different levels (manufacturing, corporate policies, sustainable energy, disposal, reusability).

Shelby was the graphic designer behind many of the Sustainability Initiative’s programs and educational material in 2005-2006, and the poster she designed for our Lug-a-mug program won an award from the University and College Designers Association.