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Kansan
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4A
Monday, September 22, 1997
David Keith / KANSAN
Examining
Fatal bike accident should be wake-up call for drivers, cyclists
A Lawrence man died last Monday while riding his bicycle to work
The 30 year-old man, who was traveling east on Ninth Street, was struck by a dump truck which he was attempting to pass on the right. Although officials concluded that the rider was at fault, this accident should be a wakeup call to both Lawrence bikers and to city officials who have not yet recognized the importance of bike lanes on Lawrence's streets.
Many people who ride bicycles in Lawrence do not conscientiously adhere to traffic laws. Many run stop signs, dart out of alleys, and, like the man who lost his life on Monday, pass on the right. This is poor judgment and anyone who rides a bicycle needs to take this incident as a reminder that your safety is ultimately in your own hands.
Lack of bike lanes in Lawrence demands attention of Lawrence City Commission.
However, bike lanes on Lawrence's major streets could help to prevent future accidents by creating both an awareness of and respect for people who choose bicycles as their mode of transportation.
If bike lanes became the norm on Lawrence's streets, not only would bikers have more room to ride safely, drivers would automatically learn to be more aware of the possibility of bikers sharing the road with them.
A good example is Monday's accident which, in reality, was probably neither the fault of the driver or the
cyclist. Most bikers ride on the far right-hand side of the road because they aren't able to maintain the speed of motor traffic. Many dump trucks have blind spots. If there had been a bike lane on Ninth Street, the driver of the dump truck may have carefully checked his right side for cyclists sharing the road with him. But, there aren't bike lanes, and the biker hit the dump truck's blind spot with fatal timing.
City Manager Mike Wildgen said that bike lanes were not an impossibility in Lawrence. The planning would be tedious because of the various street configurations in the city, he said, but the decision is ultimately that of the Lawrence City Commission.
Bike lanes are something that the commission should seriously consider, but until then, cyclists need to make sure they are riding wisely.
Elizabeth Musser for the editorial board
Greek systems need more integration
The recent increase of minority fraternities and sororites gives evidence to the sad state of race relations on this campus. There just isn't much improvement in the area of race relations at this school.
Historically, minority involvement in white sororities and fraternities was unheard of. Bigotry and discrimination were the main factors that forced minority groups to segregate themselves from the majority group and create their own greek organizations.
This is why minority sororities and fraternities first originated on college campuses. Many of the organizations were created in the early
Until we begin to integrate how and where we live,race relations will not improve.
1900's. KU's first minority greek chapter was established in 1917 with the fraternity Alpha Phi Alpha. These organizations were necessary during that time period. However, the year is 1997 and our campus should no longer resemble the scene of an early twentieth-century university. Although bigotry and discrimination still exist, American society has evolved and race relations have improved, somewhat, during the past
century. Why then, has the same evolution not occurred on the University campus?
Halo president Aida Garcia, and Greek Panhellinic Council president Ashley Udden, both agree that a feeling of unity and support is necessary for students involved in any fraternity or sorority.
Students, evidently, don't have the feeling of unity and oneness required to call themselves sorority sisters or fraternity brothers without having the same cultural and ethnic background.
Until students acquire the ability to unite with one another, race relations will remain at a fixated position.
Tina Terry for the editorial board
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"I think people are the most interesting creatures on the earth. And honey, they can set themselves into crap."
Broadon your mind: Today's quote
John Hermes, the bicyclist who was struck by a vehicle and killed last Monday at 9th and Mississippi St., was an asset to the city of Lawrence. My personal experiences
Matt
Caldwell
email@kansan.com
He unhesitatingly donated his advice and talents to secure civic-minded progress for Lawrence. It is tragically ironic that it is
Bicyclist's death sets tragic tone in lane debate
**Letters:** Should be double-spaced typed and fewer than 200 words. Letters must include the author's signature, name, address and telephone number plus class and home-town if a University student. Faculty or staff must identify their positions.
with John were few, yet I commonly associate with people who expound endlessly on his eager, charitable nature. His senseless death has left a void in the lives of those who knew him and in the lives of those who didn't.
our elected official's shortsightedness about the need for bike lanes in Lawrence that can be said to have eventually led to John's death.
—Joyce Morgan, Kingston, Mo., clarvoyiant housewife in Friday's "Kansan."
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Guest columns Should be double-
spaced typed with fewer than 700 words. The writer must be willing to be photographed for the column to run.
All letter and guest columns should be submitted to the Kansan newsroom, 111 Staufer-Flint Hall. The Kansan reserves the right to edit, cut to length or reject all submissions.
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Reviewing
I don't mean to draw attention away from the need to mourn John's passing. I mean only to draw people together to collectively ask ourselves how long we can let this go on. It has happened before.
John was killed on the corner of 9th and Mississippi on September 15 at about 3 p.m. He was riding on the right side of a dump truck that turned in to him. The dump truck didn't see John, and didn't stop driving until completely running him over.
Most often, bicyclists are the victims of inattentive drivers. Like in John's case, cars simply don't look for cyclists. Drivers don't seem to understand that, despite great pains taken by bicyclists to make themselves seen, it is their responsibility to pay heed to the cyclist. I am not convinced that any number of public service announcements will sufficiently put this problem to rest. Furthermore, bikes aren't cars. There is no logic behind setting a person on a bicycle to compete with a multi-ton speeding piece of metal for road space.
vehicle.
Bikes need bike lanes.
If you were to ask a city official how accommodating Lawrence is to its bicycling community, you may leave the conversation quite impressed. Chances are, after a stream of buzzwords and politically motivated catch phrases, you would understand that Lawrence has spent many hundreds of thousands, nay millions, of dollars on bicycle-related concerns.
With a competent system of transportation-oriented bike lanes in Lawrence, cars would expect a bike to be in the bike lane. Drivers will understand that, if they wish to cross the line dividing the street from the bike lane, they must look first to see if a bicyclist is there. Another benefit of bike lanes is the improving of bicyclist/driver relationships. If you don't often ride a bike, you may not be aware of the rift between bikers and some drivers. Many people are angry at bicyclists for one reason or another. For some drivers, the cause of the anger is bicyclists who don't obey traffic laws. Bike lanes would be a step in the direction of alleviating that annoyance. If bikes had a place where they could be assured safe and quick travel, there would be no need to break laws and swerve in and out of traffic.
Stand up against poor civic engineering like that which led to the death of John Hermes last Monday. The city should do all it can to promote bicycling. People shouldn't have to face a threat to their life to choose environmentallyfriendly transportation.
There is simply no reason why Lawrence shouldn't have bike lanes already — there is money to be had and there are thousands of bike-loving folk here. And Lawrence is similar to many other communities that have hugely successful bike transportation plans involving bike lanes such as Boulder, Colo., Davis, Calif., Madison, Wisc., and Missoula, Mont.
Despite the fact that the city makes it comfortably easy for you to believe that you need not worry about bike lanes, Lawrence is not a bike-friendly community. In fact, if actions speak louder than sound-bytes, Lawrence has done nothing for the commuter-minded bicyclist. The only community they've even tried to reach out to (not surprisingly) is West Lawrence, and there they've only built a few occasionally-used recreational bike paths.
Bike commuters have a rough time in Lawrence. Any veteran bike commuter has a handful of accident stories. The stories vary in their gruesomeness, but one thing that is not variable is who is the victim and who is the assailant. Accidents involving adults on bicycles are only very rarely the fault of the cyclist. In those unusual cases where the fault is the cyclists', generally it is because the cyclist was trying to narrowly escape collision with one vehicle and inadvertently ran into another
This is your community, whether you were raised here or not — make an investment in it. Tell your city officials what they were hired to do.
There is a vigil and rally in remembrance of John tommorow at 5:30pm at the Community Mercantile, 9th & Mississippi St. The group will bike to the 6 p.m. City Commission meeting at City Hall to demand a restructuring of priorities in this town. Please come.
Caldwell is a Lawrence senior in biology.
Nurturing nature's beauty easy to do: act naturally
passenger doors of the 1971 Toyota Landcruiser rattled as we headed down the rough mountain pass and away from the Continental Divide. I tightened my window and closed the floor vent. Still the cold crept in.
The sign in the abandoned Colorado mining town read, "Take only photographs, leave only footprints." The
We spent another quiet mountain evening singing songs by the campfire. I dressed in layers of clothes and headed for a warm, hopefully dry
Stevens John
lisajohn@ukans.edu
sleeping bag that would buffer the cool blast of mountain air until the sun rose.
The phrase I had read on the sign stayed in my mind like a mantra through the night. I had taken photographs, time-release shots of a happy couple leaning against a rusty vehicle. When we left, only our footprints remained.
There is something to be said for the beauty of the earth. Mere aesthetics, yes. But more.
In Colorado, it's the mountains, the fragile tundra flowers and the clear streams that rush through the timberline unaware of its height. It is those who wait below, knee-deep in hip waders with fly rods in hand. They wait for the catch of the day as they stand amid nature's stunning beauty.
For some of us who have lived on the prairie, the beauty of Kansas is on Mount Oread. I moved to Lawrence this summer from a small town in the middle of the state, where the tallest structure in townexcluding the grain elevator is the three-story courthouse. It's a two-elevator, no stoplight town.
Many of the more than 24,000 students at the University's Lawrence campus came here from places like that — places where there is beauty that one must search to find.
The difference at the University is that one doesn't have to search for beauty. The tall pines that lean into hillsides, the floral land-scapings that dot the campus, the red-roofed native limestone buildings that touch the sky, the hand-laid stones by expert masons of the past, the Campanile that chimes the hours, the hazy valleys to the north and south, the sidewalks and stairs beneath our feet little marred by the weather and our steps — these and more continue the pride and expectation of the visionaries who planned this campus so many years ago.
I've recently read complaints about litter left on campus. Doggy droppings, newspapers, cigarette butts lying on the ground one needn't look far to find it. The fading cigarette butts seem to hang on for years, newspapers slouch soggy on the steps of Wescoe and doggy debris must wait to biodegrade.
There is beauty in the rustle of a golden wheat field. Beauty is in the wind-driven clouds on a moonlit summer night or the modesty of a well-planned, small town square. And there are many towns in Kansas, large and small, whose citizens look at their surroundings and rightfully take pride in what they see.
What can we do to help?
Or better, we could prevent the littering in the first place. To borrow a lingering thought from an old Colorado mining town, "Take only photographs, leave only footprints."
We could bend over and pick it up.
Stevens John is a Tonganexie graduate student in journalism.
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