Belmont’s Student Bikers Cut School Traffic

Test and photos by  David Chase

This fall, we solved a school crowding problem by moving two grades from the middle school to the new combined middle and high school. However, with almost 50% more students arriving every morning, this move aggravated an already-bad traffic problem on Concord Avenue.

The new combined school has 2,128 students. If each one of them traveled in a car through the single-lane Goden Street entrance, the line would take over an hour to clear.

Fortunately, that doesn’t happen; many students carpool, many walk, many get dropped off a short distance from the high school and walk the remainder, avoiding (and not worsening) the backups on Concord. Fifteen percent (324) take the bus. And because the new high school and middle school have far more and much better bike racks than they did in the past, almost 14% (290, on one day’s count) ride a bike or use a scooter.

The combined school has several kinds of racks. The best ones are upright “staples” anchored in concrete, and sheltered from the weather, close to the building entrances. These are very popular. The racks near the high school entrance were overwhelmed with bicycles, both locked and unlocked; I counted 109 bikes and scooters parked on or around just these racks (below).

Racks further from the entrance (and uprotected from the weather) were not nearly as heavily used (below).

Some racks use an old inferior design that is more difficult for secure locking and use space less efficiently. They’re better than no rack, but clearly less useful and less popular than the staples just past them.

The middle school, with fewer (and younger) students, has sheltered racks that are all in use, but generally not as crowded as the high school racks.

Shelter and proximity make the old racks worth the trouble.

A study conducted in the fall of 2017 counted about 100 students out of 1,294 commuting by bicycle. If bicycle use had scaled with increased school size, we would see (about) 165 students biking. Instead, we see another 75% more than that.

Installing a large number of convenient, sheltered bike racks of good quality turned out to be a good choice. It will be interesting to see how well these racks are used during the winter. Will the shelter and proximity and weather are good enough to keep kids biking to school?

This survey also suggests that, when the first phase of the Belmont Community Path and the tunnel connecting to the Winn Brook neighborhood are complete, we’ll need more racks and perhaps stand-alone shelters for some of the currently exposed bike parking. All the best ones are full already.

If we don’t like traffic, we should do what we can to make the alternatives easy and inviting.

David Chase is a director of the Belmont Citizens Forum.