Cycling Visionaries Awards - Project Details

Campus Design & Policy Handbook

A training guide intended to empower members of campuses to make effective long-term changes in support of bicycling, drawing on international examples. Design considerations, policy mechanisms, and even scientific methods are addressed.

Drawing on a broad view of policy mechanisms, aesthetic and spatial considerations, and decision making frameworks, including case examples from Europa and America as an international perspective on best practices and cutting edge developments around the world, the project is producing “Design, Research and Policy Methods for Achieving Healthy and Sustainable Bike Transportation: A Campus Handbook”.

Campuses almost universally have high bicycle potential, but this is often not achieved. Bicycling facilities are frequently neglected, and campus expertise is often lacking. Lobbies for automobile facilitation may overpower bicycle interests in many cases. Meanwhile, students come and go, making it more difficult to build political momentum and maintain a stable and informed presence at the policymaking table.

What is the potential for increasing active transportation on any given campus, what would be the look, feel and tangible benefits, and how can we achieve that potential? The way we travel to and through our campuses makes a difference in every aspect of our lives, including our educational experience.

Readers will learn a broad spectrum of useful knowledge: methods to assess the potential to increase active transport to and on campus; the implications of achieving that potential, in comparison with maintaining the status quo, including cost-benefit analysis, health and well-being effects and qualitative outcomes such as the subjective feeling of various scenarios; concrete examples of good and bad decisions, particularly on campuses; best practices, ideals, and cutting edge proposals from around the globe, particularly European and California examples to compare and inspire; and finally the decision-making framework, and how to maximize the effectiveness of advocacy efforts and institutionalize progressive inclusion for cycling despite the limited-term participation that characterizes most campus civic involvement.

Authored by pedestrian and bicycle planning expert Jason Meggs, and public space design researcher and licensed architect Dorota Wiśniewska, a comprehensive tutorial on making a difference on your campus and its urban context is the subject of this project.

Dorota Wiśniewska\'s public space research and works have included bicycling-related projects such as tourist bike routes in Starogard Borough, Poland; the new biking idea for downtown Bydgoszcz, showing the opportunities of the new circular system linking the bike paths with the river and greenery.; and a site plan for the Nasielsk train station, integrating bike paths and bike stops with other transportation modes on the rail route from Gdansk to Warsaw.

Jason Meggs has extensive experience and training in bicycle advocacy, planning and research. He was a founding member of the UC Berkeley Campus Bicycle Committee, appointed as the Graduate Assembly representative for the creation of the first Campus Bicycle Plan, and participated in California-wide campus sustainability planning efforts 1993-2010, in addition to local, regional, state, national and international initiatives. His graduate studies focused on legal mechanisms and international comparisons in sustainable transportation and land use from an environmental health perspective.

The team met at the Ecocity World Summit in Montréal and have collaborated on a diversity of projects since. As both are interested in the social dimension and effectiveness of urban design for public spaces and sustainable active transport, the interdisciplinary synergy of their related but quite different fields has been very rewarding. They are collaborating on the guidebook along with presentations of the material.