TRAFFIC in Charlottesville is excruciating. What's worse, these vehicular crowds affect more people than just their fellow motorists. Anyone who rides a bike around Grounds and town can attest to how hectic, harrowing and downright hazardous the proposition of biking around Charlottesville can be. Bikes offer a great way to get around town, but unfortunately certain major roads in the area remain without a bike lane. Alderman Road, which stretches across a main portion of Grounds and offers access to a wide range of college facilities, is one such road that lacks a dedicated lane for cyclists. The University should pressure the City of Charlottesville to install a bike lane on the road, because the University has the most to lose if Alderman remains perilous to bikers.
For most, Alderman Road is the avenue that becomes choked with orange-draped masses flooding toward the football stadium on certain Saturdays in the fall. But many students and citizens use Alderman Road daily as a route from popular areas such as Jefferson Park Avenue and Stadium Road. Much of the on-Grounds housing the University offers is also served by Alderman Road; in addition to the first-year housing behind O-Hill, the unlucky souls in Gooch/Dillard and Hereford all use the road to get to locations closer to Grounds. Though it acts as a major artery in a frequented region of Grounds, Alderman still lacks a dedicated lane for bikes to separate those who ride them from the congestion and unsafe driving that take place there.
I have the distinct misfortune of counting myself amongst the damned out in Gooch, and cycling to and from my lovely residence has been the most frightening experience I've been subjected to in recent memory. It is bad enough that some students get stuck with lackluster housing way past the AFC, but when one considers the treacheries the avenue presents to those residents, the proposition takes on a distinct aura of a gauntlet. Navigate a bike along a narrow strip of cement, sandwiched between a curb and a Crown Vic on dubs, and you are safe for another day. Despite the obvious entertainment value this presents in text, it is a real concern; one cannot help but feel somewhat like a fleeing amphibian from Frogger while dodging a variety of fast-moving vehicles en route to wider McCormick and beyond. Bikers can feel like targets of the vehicles that constantly charge up and down Alderman Road.
Alderman's remoteness from Central Grounds makes this issue all the more relevant. Students that live on the road or close by in off-Grounds residences are pressed into finding the most efficient way to get to class. Busses offer a viable option, but many students in the area choose bikes for their relative ease of use and the independence they afford around Grounds. "It's nice to have a bike once I'm in town, but the ride to and from is horrible," complains Matt Walters, a third-year College student and Gooch resident. "Cars move way too fast on Alderman."
Though University Police Lieut. Melissa Fielding notes that the department "does run radar on [Alderman] road to see that the 25 m.p.h. limit is abided by," biking to class remains a trying experience. The University must facilitate a more comfortable travel environment for cycling students in the area, because it is the University's own housing that places these students at such a distance from grounds that biking becomes necessary. "Living out here is brutal because it takes an extra ten minutes -- even on bike -- to get to class on time," Walters said. If the University is going to continue to house students on Alderman Road and in Hereford (and judging by the massive construction pit currently being dug outside O-Hill, all signs point to the affirmative), it needs to improve the traffic patterns on the road.
Safety on the road is a real issue. In lieu of installing a set of gates like those that operate on McCormick Road, and pushing every driver in Charlottesville to the very limit of sanity, the University should create bike lanes that run the length of the road. The dedicated cyclist lanes would keep timid bikers off the sidewalks and brash riders out of the road, simultaneously improving pedestrian and motorist experiences. Julia Monteith, the senior land use and community planner for the University architect, cautions that such an installment would be an involved process. According to Monteith, Alderman Road is controlled by the VDOT, and is several feet of width short of being a candidate for bike lanes. "Alderman's width inhibits just ... striping [bikes] lanes," explains Monteith. "The road would have to be widened." While such a project would be involved, the magnitude of students the University has housed in the Alderman Road area necessitates such a real solution. The University must move to facilitate a safer transit experience for the bike-riding students in the community, because as it stands now, every ride down Alderman feels like Russian Roulette on wheels. It is only a matter of time before someone loses that game.
Dave Infante's column appears Fridays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at dinfante@cavalierdaily.com.
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