The Rocky Mountain Collegian

Issue date: 2/13/09 Section: News

Media Credit: Lisa Streeb Students wait to cross the street on their bikes Thursday, February 12, 2009. The intersection of Sheilds Street and Elizabeth Street is busy during the day for both bikers and drivers.

Following the deaths of two local cyclists last year, CSU and Fort Collins community members gathered for a bicycle safety summit at the CSU Center for Public Deliberation Thursday night to discuss the improvement of city-wide bike safety.

After CSU advisor Rebecca Allen was struck and killed by a drunk driver in July 2008 and 9-year-old Erica Forney was killed in a car-related accident in November 2008, summit attendees expressed a need to increase driver and bicyclist education.

"We're here to understand and create a culture of safety," said David "DK" Kemp, the City of Fort Collins Bicycle coordinator, adding that mutual awareness between cyclists and motorists is important to that culture.

CSU Police Department staff represented CSU at the summit but few students were in attendance, a fact that came as a disappointment to Rick Price, owner of Experience Plus, which runs national and international bicycle and walking tours.

"College students are the single biggest group that needs to be educated," Price said.

Kemp said CSU students are more likely to obey bike laws while on campus because of the strong presence of bicycle enforcement officers but disregard biking laws within the city.

"They obey traffic laws on campus, but once they're off-campus, they start to disobey," Kemp said. "We just want them to ride respectively in the rest of the city."

Joe Dauner, a senior chemical engineering major, wasn't surprised that students didn't gather in numbers at the summit. He said he thinks most student cyclists only bike to avoid the hassle of driving a car to campus.

"I think it stems from the fact that there are all kinds of riders, and most students are just riding to commute," he said.

Dauner, who lives in Wellington, about 14 miles outside of Fort Collins, said he makes the one-hour ride on bike from Wellington to CSU about once a week.

The Bicycle Safety Summit, which drew around 75 concerned community members, was hosted by CSU's Center for Public Deliberation, a non-partisan public service that facilitates community discussions on specific local issues.

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