By Christopher Lessler
I’m a freshman who lives a ten minute walk away from all of my classes, a fifteen minute walk to literally anywhere on campus, and a quick walk or bus ride to various Pittsburgh urban centers. I could totally survive without a bike, and on most days, I do. Yet I would never want to live without a bike on campus.
A bike makes my life so much more convenient. For instance, whenever I get groceries off campus, it’s always by bike. Bus service in Pittsburgh is relatively decent, but I’ve sometimes found waiting times for buses can top ten or fifteen minutes. That isn’t forever — but in that amount of time I could have already biked the entire way to several grocery stores. With a rack and bag on my bike, carrying groceries isn’t something I have to think about, either. A bike just might be the literal quickest way to get around nearby areas in Pittsburgh. Buses always take some time to arrive, and cars have to be parked, yet with biking I’m not dependent on a bus schedule, and I usually find free parking at my destination.
Even though I don’t bike to and from classes, it’s great to know I have that option. It’d feel excessive to try to cut down a ten minute walking commute to five minutes biking, or a five minute walk into a three minute bike ride. But if I’m running late to something important on campus, it’s great to know I always have the option to grab my bike and get where I need to be quicker. Plus, although I live very close to main campus, I know the same cannot be said for everybody — in my case, I’ll be living slightly farther away next year in an on-campus apartment. When living slightly farther, even in a dorm, a biking commute to campus saves a lot of valuable time. I’ll likely bike to campus some of the time next year, considering I could save up to 10 minutes each way traveling to campus.
Biking is also a great source of exercise. I’m not really a gym person, but I’d still like to have some exercise. Biking fulfills a nice middle ground in terms of exercising intensity. Even with an electric bike (which I don’t have but is worth considering in a city as hilly as ours) you’re at least doing something active. It’s not much, but it’s more than nothing. Pittsburgh is a decent city for biking as a source of transit, but if you know where to look, I’ve found it’s even better for recreational biking. We have Schenley Park right on our doorstep, Frick Park not too far away, plus great bike paths along the Monongahela river — easily accessible from campus by heading down into Junction Hollow between Tepper and TCS.
It’s great to have a bike for on-campus transit, and a bike’s usefulness really shines off campus. I live in a dorm very close to main campus, and I still find this applies to me. At times I’ve felt unwillingly glued to campus, and it helps to have, in my opinion, the most convenient method of transportation — a bike. I surely could stay on campus for every hour of every day if I wanted to; campus is great. But having a bike has allowed me to clear my mind of the hustle and bustle by making it super convenient to go all around Pittsburgh. That alone makes having a bike worth it.
Leave a Reply