Two professors are waiting for their accepted proposal so a bike lane on the north side of campus can become a reality.
Marcy Meyer, an associate professor of communication studies, said she was almost hit by a man driving a pickup truck as she rode her bike through a parking lot.
“He was moving forward while looking in his rearview mirror at somebody that he had just said goodbye to, and he had an ear bud in his ear,” she said. “So he wasn’t really paying attention. I was lucky, my bike got totaled, but I didn’t get hurt in that incident.
“But those things are really scary when they happen, and I think if we just invested a little bit in the infrastructure in the city and the campus, then those sort of things would be less likely to occur.”
Meyer then brought the idea for a bike lane to Sheryl Swingley, a member of Council On The Environment and a journalism instructor.
Swingley made the initial proposal in September to COTE, which “provides leadership for initiatives at Ball State and in the surrounding community that promote the sustainable use of natural resources and the protection of ecological systems that sustain life,” according to its website.
COTE also aims to make a bike lane on Oakwood Avenue, between McGalliard and Bethel avenues.
“We just got the discussion started,” she said. “It could take five, six, seven, eight years before this comes to be.”
Swingley said the proposal passed with little discussion, which is unusual for COTE proposals.
“Usually, it takes a couple of times before a resolution passes because we seriously consider what we’re recommending, and our recommendations usually go to administration,” she said.
Swingley said she thought it would be a good way to improve the environment and help reduce the university’s carbon footprint.
Meyer lives near Oakwood Avenue and bikes to campus daily.
“I live close enough to campus that I’m really fortunate that I can bike here,” she said. “But over the past 15 years or so that I’ve been doing this, there have been a number of times where just like the hard physical reality of biking in Muncie has come to my attention.”
There are other faculty and students who live around Oakwood Avenue and the apartment complexes, including The Grove.
“I also lived in Scheidler [Apartments off Tillotson Avenue] the first year that I came here, and I used to have to cross over McGalliard [Avenue], where there’s just a little median there and you kind of have to dodge the cars and ride across a field and cut through a parking lot,” Meyer said. “So people in Scheidler could come right down on Norwood [Drive] and join onto Oakwood [Avenue] and come into campus on the bike lane there.”
Freshman magazine journalism major Haley Gillilan said although bike lanes would take some getting used to, they would be a good idea.
“It’s so stressful — I don’t like bikes, they’re really scary, especially when they come from behind me,” Gillilan said. “But they would be a good addition because bikers can feel like they have a place, and they’re not in the way.”
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