By Adam Call Roberts

“I don’t know of any plan to charge a fee, and I’m not in favor of a fee,” Chancellor Gearhart said.

Gearhart and students agree on the majority of campus bike policy issues. In a meeting with a dozen student representatives last week, the chancellor outlined the Department of Transit and Parking’s reasons for issuing bike permits.

Thanks to action by student protesters and the Staff Senate, permit fees are off the table. Thanks to an ASG bike census, we now have a more accurate way to estimate the number of daily riders. Everyone agreed that we should plan for the future anyway, and build more bike racks than we need right now.

The ASG members who support mandatory permits (and, frighteningly, there are more than you think) cited registration of bikes as a way to help police recover stolen bikes.

I’m still very skeptical about how registration is going to help. But if it does, there’s no reason for the university to simply duplicate other organizations’ efforts. The National Bike Registry will send you a sticker and put you into a database that will be useful even if the thief brings your bike off campus. If you’re worried about theft, it’s a lot easier to just take a photo of your serial number than to fill out a form.

And at any rate, there’s no reason to make what is essentially an insurance program mandatory or to call the stickers “permits.”

The final reason Transit and Parking stated it had to require registration was the claim that it would make ticketing bikes easier.

The problem of improperly parked bicycles should near an end next semester. The department, at the urging of ASG, is planning to install enough new racks to accommodate more then 200 bikes. ASG is also recommending that some of the unused racks be moved to high-traffic areas.

This will work a lot better than the failed permit plan: Only about 15 percent of bikes parked on campus have permit stickers, despite free publicity for the registration program by The Traveler and UATV, and Transit and Parking officials handing out permits themselves in front of the Union for days. People simply don’t want the stickers. No matter what sort of PR work the university does, registration is never going to get above 20 or 25 percent. The only way to even get close to full compliance is the extreme step of seizing bikes without permits.

I don’t think that Transit and Parking officials are willing to impound bikes that are parked properly just because they don’t have a sticker. And if they are, they should resign – the university’s mission calls on it to reward responsible bike riders and visitors to campus, not to punish them for missing paperwork.

A lot of alternatives to confiscation were discussed, including painting bikes or using some sort of bike boot. Booting or chaining an improperly parked bike that’s locked up to a tree or a railing would just make the problem worse. Painting bikes is almost certainly illegal.

My solution? Use the current rules.

According to the July 1, 2009, document “Parking and Traffic Regulations” from the university Web site, if bikes are improperly parked or create a safety hazard, they can be immobilized or impounded. Bike owners currently have 60 days to claim their impounded bikes. The policy requires that the owner have a receipt or a notarized statement of ownership, as well as registration with the university. This seems a bit excessive, and could use some revision.

But the point is that we can solve all the problems the Transit and Parking Department submitted to the chancellor without permits. There’s simply no need for them.

Not everyone sees it this way. Some ASG members are under the delusion that the problem is “a resistance to change” and “bad PR.” At both the meeting and the town hall last week, elected ASG representatives suggested the administration should just wait for all the people upset with the new rules to graduate. In four years, freshmen can be told “this is the way it is” and they won’t complain.

President Mattie Bookhout spoke out in both instances: “We need to set policies because they’re the right thing to do, not because we hope everyone will forget in the future.”

I agree.