University of Idaho promotes bike lights

Garry Whitebird, a first-year graduate student at the University of Idaho, will soon illuminate the streets of Moscow with 75 pairs of red and white twinkling lights. The colors are suggestive of holiday cheer, but also signify serious safety to the 23-year-old avid cyclist. Thanks to a $1,913 grant from the University’s Sustainability Center and a generous donation from a local bike shop, Whitebird and his fellow Vandal Cycling teammates will install blinking bulbs on the first 75 bikes to roll into the campus’ “Bike Fix” event in April, costing students a mere $2 per pair. The bi-annual event provides free tune-ups and repairs to UI cyclists. Each year, the Sustainability Center awards approximately $9,000 in grants to support student projects that help create an active culture of sustainability on campus and in the communities in which the school operates. Whitebird’s proposal - to increase two-wheeled, non-motorized transportation among students by providing affordable, legally-mandated lighting – fit neatly into the Center’s mission to reduce the school’s environmental footprint. Whitebird was one of three students to receive funding this past October. “I think one of the biggest obstacles in increasing bike usage is people’s fears about safety,” Whitebird explains. “My goal is to get more students on bikes and home safely, at a reasonable cost.” Whitebird has used bikes for recreation and transportation most of his life, a culture he says was instilled in him while growing up and attending college in Madison, Wisc., where he says bike lanes, bike parking and bike commuting are prolific. It was the University of Idaho’s new Professional Science Master’s Program and its track in Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences that convinced Whitebird to leave his bike-friendly hometown and migrate to the Palouse. Upon arriving, he immediately rolled into Moscow’s biking scene by joining the Vandal Cycling club and by frequenting Paradise Creek Bicycles, where he befriended owner T-Jay Clevenger while garnering tips on building a fixed-gear bike from scratch. According to Clevenger, it was a brainstorming session in his shop that triggered the bike-light grant proposal idea. “Garry was trying to come up with a project that would promote safety and encourage more biking, and we started talking about how many people ride without lights,” Clevenger recalls. The shop owner says that in 20 years of biking, he’s been “dinged” three times, and that was with lights on. “I can imagine that the odds go up significantly if you’re not lighted,” he said. “It drives me crazy, the people without lights.” So the idea was born, and when Whitebird returned to Celevenger with a written grant proposal and an invitation to be involved, he didn’t hesitate. “I told him I would give him the lights at cost and would support him 100 percent,” Clevenger says. This donation enabled Whitebird to offer students a $20 light set for only $2. “His project fit right in with my mission,” Clevenger explains, “which is to engage the communities of Moscow and Pullman in the active, healthy and safe lifestyle of cycling. Idaho doesn’t do a great job of lighting up the streets, so we all need to light up our bikes.” The overall goal for Whitebird is to bring about a long-term culture change in the student body. “We need to get so many lights on bikes that when new students come to campus and see current students riding with lights, they’ll be cued into that culture,” he explains. And so will drivers. According to an article cited in Whitebird’s proposal, the more bicyclists that drivers see, the more cautious they are to avoid them. The influx of 75 pairs of lights will certainly make cyclists more visible, and Whitebird’s hope is that this heightened visibility will not only shift riding culture, but driving culture as well. The grad student’s long-term professional goal is to find a job leading a sustainability center similar to the one at UI, where he is now serving as an AmeriCorps volunteer in addition to being a student. Whitebird’s has nothing but gratitude to the Center, and frequently mentions the other grantees as equally deserving of recognition. They are: Matthew Aghai, whose project focuses on increasing water use efficiency at the University’s nursery, and Gabe Garcia, who will research ways to improve the quality of the University’s compost.