Freshmen

Tomorrow marks the first day of the year for students at UCD, which means a number of things. The roads and eateries will be packed, the bathrooms on campus will once again become disgusting and unusable, furniture will go missing, and not-very-clever messages will be left on our chalk boards. More importantly, though, there will be 6,000 freshman trying to stay upright on bicycles. Davis is a biking campus and a biking community, but if you zoom out beyond that you quickly find that we, the people of the United States of America, are not a cycling culture. Maybe we are between the ages of 6 and 10. So basically what you've got is a bunch of 8 year olds (with rusty bike-handling skills) trying not to run into one another. Stanford is also a biking school, being enormous, flat, and mostly paved, and has similar troubles. Everybody is back on a bike for the first time in years and waaaaaay too confident in their abilities to maneuver past trouble with their superior intellect and life skills. I heard that the average Stanford student gets into two bike crashes a year. I only managed two* during my entire stay there, and I was considerate enough to not take anybody else down with me.

Stanford has an Intersection of Death, which is basically what it sounds like - an unmarked intersection that nearly everybody has to ride through on the way to and from their classes. There are a few conveniently placed benches right on one of the corners of this intersection, and if you can get over being a bit of an asshole, its some terrific free entertainment to sit and watch people do stupid things. Extra exciting when somebody goes flying though late for class or if somebody on a skateboard doesn't know what they're doing. Davis seems a little more self-aware, on the administrative level at least, because they've installed traffic circles at all of the major bike intersections. However, I'm not confident that everybody knows how to use a traffic circle. Shit, I'm pretty sure not everybody here knows to ride on the right and don't stop abruptly and start talking on your cell phone in the middle of a busy street. But anyways, if I'm unavailable tomorrow, try the traffic circle by the silo. I could use some company.



*Crash number 1: Riding down a short hill, over a plank across a stream, and then up another short hill on Nic's bike. Nic's bike has no brakes, no seat, and no clamp to prevent the handlebars from rotating freely. It is orange, though.

Crash number 2: Attempting to take a turn, wave, and switch on my bike light while going over a curb and carry several large pieces of aluminum roundstock for a project. It's also worth noting that I can't ride with no hands. I crashed right in front of the side of my dorm with all the windows, a dismaying number of which produced familiar faces. All I could think to do was make a gravel angel and try to play it off.