Sawyer Kreikemeier,
Dante Fisher, Clint Wilson, Rafe Parker
Jon Carter
Comm250
December 8, 2015
Commons Campaign Portfolio
http://unlbikesafety.blogspot.com/
For our group’s
commons campaign, we decided to create an online blog that promoted safety
regulations between bicyclists and pedestrians on campus. The exigence of our
campaign was to educate the students and faculty of the University of
Nebraska-Lincoln campus on the safety of pedestrians in relation to people on
bicycles. We strived to think about how to promote the issue to our audience
and how the issue could be changed, while thinking of ways to relate to our
audience and gain their support.
Our target audience was
the people that walk on the sidewalks of every day; the students, faculty, and
administration of UNL. We created a blog to encourage discussion on the topic,
and well as present information relevant to the issue. In response to our
proposal, we decided that it was necessary to get the opinion of our audience
on the topic in order to see how people on campus felt about the issue and what
could be changed.
We knew from the
beginning that our biggest constraint would be getting word out about our
campaign, and getting people to support it. We understood that ultimately we
would have to spread information about our campaign by word-of-mouth, but the
only way to track support was through our blog.
One of the affordances
we were aware of at the beginning of our project was the fact that many people
on campus are aware of the need for safety between bicyclists and pedestrians.
It have been noted on social media pages that people do not appreciate almost
getting ran-over by someone riding a bike while walking to class, and we used
that to our advantage. We also appreciated the fact that it would be easy to
get a general feel of people’s opinions on the issue through a survey. Since
many people on campus are familiar with the topic, they were more likely to
take the minute or two to take our survey and help us as a group gather data on
the issue.
Beginning our project,
we first set out on the city campus in an attempt to find any signs that are
directed to bicyclists. At the beginning of the year, two of us remembered
seeing a sign near Morrill Hall that told bicyclists to keep at least three
feet between them and walking pedestrians. While walking all around campus, we
found no signs that appealed to the safety of pedestrians in relation to
individuals on bicycles. Following that, we created our blog. The purpose of
our blog was to establish an online presence and to get the word out about our
campaign for bicyclist vs. pedestrian safety on campus. We made sure to include
the little information that the university provides on its website about
bicyclist safety, hoping that other people looking at the blog would see that
more safety is needed. After creating the blog, we devised a five-question
survey that we sent out to our peers across the university. The survey was open
for two weeks, from Tuesday, November 17th, until Tuesday, December 1st. In the survey, we asked
students and faculty if they felt bicyclists need to have more etiquette for
pedestrians on campus, if they have been hit by a bicyclist, how safe they feel
around bicyclists on the sidewalks, if bicyclists should yield to pedestrians
or vice versa, and areas on city campus with the highest bicycle traffic.
Options for the areas included Vine Street from 17th Street to Memorial Stadium, the
sidewalks between Andrews Hall and Richards Hall, the Union to Brace Hall, and
the sidewalks along 14th,
16th, and “R” Streets. After the
survey was done, we went over the data and published it on the blog.
The blog that we
created served as the medium for our project. From there we posted our group’s
intentions on what we planned to accomplish with this project for our
audience’s understanding. As a reflection of our exigence, we included links to
the university’s website regarding the current regulations in place for people
riding bikes on campus, as a way to show our audience where we started, and
where to go from there. After that, we created the survey that we emailed to
our classes. We asked five simple questions that were relevant to our project
in hopes that they would accurately represent the opinions of UNL students and
faculty about the issue of bikes on campus.
Several things went well
in our group’s quest for pedestrian safety with bicyclists. Gathering public
opinion about bicycle vs. pedestrian safety on campus went very well, as we
received many responses that showed the need for bicycle safety. It was very
easy to create an online survey and email it to our classes and other peers on
campus, in order to gather information on how people across campus feel about
the issue. Spreading the message online went very well, too. Creating a blog
was a great way to provide information to UNL students about the issue of
pedestrian safety in relation to bicyclists. It was easy to upload information
that was provided by the university’s website, as well as start discussion
about the topic and what should be done about it. Being able to put our data gathered
from the survey was great as it gave students and faculty a general sense of
feeling about the issue.
There are several things
that our group could do differently in the future if we were to do the project
again. It would have been helpful to have more presence both online and in
person about the project. Each of us could have shared the blog on our social
media sites like Facebook and Twitter, asking people to take a look at it and
discuss the issue. We could have also created social media sites for our
campaign, rather than just having a single blog about it. In person, we could
have spoken to peers and instructors about the issue, striking up conversations
across campus, which would not only get people talking about the issue but also
direct them to our social media sites to get more information on what is being
proposed. Our group could have reached out to the Transportation Services here
at UNL, letting them know about our project and talking to them about the
issue. We could have seen if they have an opinion on the issue, or if they had
any plans for signage around campus or more definitive regulations for people
biking on campus. All of these things could have helped solidify our campaign
more and make more people aware of the issue.
Even though we may
not have gained as much support as we had hoped to, we still believe that our
campaign could make a change to the issue. It does not matter if the university
amends its regulations for bicycling on campus. If the only successful thing
taken from our campaign is a few bicyclists taking safer precautions around
pedestrians on campus, then our campaign succeeded.
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