To the Editors:
Walking around campus one could easily make the observation that there isn’t just a slight lack of bicycle parking, but a drastic deficit. Certain areas have adequate amounts of bicycle parking, but the most convenient and practical areas are most often beyond capacity.
The university’s response has not been to create more bicycle parking, but to have Public Safety ticket and boot bicycles for absurd infractions. Locking your bike to a street sign is “obscuring the sidewalk,” and locking it to a handrail in a staircase is “blocking a safety device in a fire escape.” These rules, like many rules everywhere, have a huge disparity between logic and the letter of the law. The claims these tickets make up are so petty and outlandish I couldn’t have made them up if I wanted to. They are that absurd.
It’s embarrassing that our institute of higher education, where people go for graduate degrees, could have a rule that is so blatantly dumb. Making the senseless assumption, that some liability exists in chaining ones bike to a street sign, condones those who abuse our legal system and encourages those who pander to our overly litigious society.
Since we the students foot the bill for what happens here at our university, we need to find a way to have the rules reflect the student body better than they currently do. I think that Public Safety writing tickets for a bike being locked to something other than a rack is absurd, and one would be hard pressed to find a student who disagreed.
However, if the university and Public Safety find it important to spend their time writing frivolous tickets, I would much prefer them write tickets to the Danna Center for smelling like sewage. Thanks. Matthew Portnoy
economics senior
