It’s 9:55 a.m. on a Monday, and campus is a nightmare. Pedestrians are dodging cars, intersections are sites of mass confusion and the parking services attendant is (gleefully, we like to imagine) putting tickets on the haphazardly parked cars. The sea of cars, trucks and SUVs makes one wonder if they are in Tuscaloosa or Atlanta during rush hour. You’re late for your 10 a.m. class and turn down an offer for a ride from your roommate, as sitting through the seemingly endless traffic will just make you even later. On the Crimson Ride app, you see the next bus comes in 18 minutes. With a sigh, you resign yourself to the awkward half-jog it will take to get to class on time and all the back sweat that comes along with it.
With enough patience, time management and antiperspirant, The University of Alabama can be a suitable “walking campus.” However, with campus growing ever larger and hot Alabama summers that seem to last far longer than they’re wanted, many students elect to drive and risk getting a parking ticket or have a friend take them to class. As the student population swells past 36,000, transportation is becoming a real problem.
The Crimson Ride is a very good bus service and, in my experience, it is better than what most other college campuses have to offer. However, I would like to see the University make it even better, as an effective and speedy bus option would be beneficial to students and would cut down on campus traffic. Many Crimson Ride routes seem to go the same direction around campus. Streamlining the routes, along with a few more buses and bus stops, could make the Crimson Ride a more viable transportation option than it already is.
UA’s most glaring issue is the lack of support for bikers and skateboarders. The presence of bike lanes on campus is erratic; some roads have excellent space for bikers, but others have either only lanes for one direction or no lanes at all. This wouldn’t be too big of an issue, but the UA Police Department seems to have declared war on bikers and skateboarders. Unfortunately, the Alabama Code treats bicycles as motor vehicles, and it is not uncommon to see police officers pulling over bikers and skateboarders on campus. From personal anecdotes from friends and classmates, I’ve found usually these “traffic” stops result from traveling the wrong direction in a bike lane, traveling on a sidewalk, or cutting through grass—seemingly harmless activities, most of the time. An example—Colonial drive, a one-way street, is easily the fastest way to ride a bike from the southeast side of campus to the northwest side of campus, and being forced to go all the way around to Hackberry Lane is needless and adds around five minutes to a trip.
If UAPD’s strict bicycle crackdown seems ridiculous to you, I agree; becoming a more bicycle friendly campus seems to be the best way to improve the transportation situation. As it stands right now, UA’s campus during class change resembles something like a cross between a zombie apocalypse movie and a Best Buy Black Friday sale, and I think we would all like to see that improve.
Kyle Simpson is a junior majoring in biology. His column runs weekly on Thursdays.
