| Senior hopes to organize mass carpool program for students (11/07) | | Print | |
| Written by Angela M. Chen | |
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Sporting a blue helmet on a sea-foam green bicycle, senior Ramon Solis cruises down Eucalyptus Drive arriving promptly to school each morning. Price of gas: zero. Amount of emission: zero. Satisfaction from saving the environment: priceless. After frequently struggling to find a place to store his bike, Solis successfully convinced the school administration to install more bike racks. Four new bike racks, which will hold a total of eight bikes, will be installed later this month. The current bike racks are inadequate, Solis explained. “We don’t even have real bike racks,” he said. “It’s a fence that doubles as what the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition calls a ‘toaster rack.’ (Cyclists) have to lift their bikes over the fence, which often scrapes the paint off the down tube and the fork of the bike.” Solis pushed for new racks to encourage biking to school as a means to help the environment and help reduce congestion. “I wanted to increase awareness for using the bicycle as a viable and cost effective way to commute to school,” Solis said. Solis has an even more ambitious plan to reduce congestion in mind — a mass carpool program. “The carpool program would match (students) up with others who live in their vicinity,” Solis said. “Then they could organize themselves into who would drive each other.” But after Solis proposed his plan to the school district, the Risk Management Department rejected it due to liability issues, stating that a school-sponsored carpool program would put the district in danger. Principal Andy Ishibashi explained the legal ramifications. “If Lowell sponsored the carpool, and a student got into an accident, the district would be sued,” he said. Despite these roadblocks, Solis has gained a wave of support for the carpool idea from the Parent Teacher Student Association and the administration. “I really felt his idea had merit,” Ishibashi said. He suggested that one alternative is for students to develop a non school-sponsored carpool program. |
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to listen.
