Bicycle Amenities Station Project Hopes to Spread Bike Culture at The New School

With the help of a grant from The New School’s Green Fund, Parsons design professor Nicholas Brinen is working to create bike stations around The New School’s campus. The stations – equipped with repair tools, maps, air pumps, patch kits, and solar chargers – will not only be available to New School students but to the greater cycling public as well, in the hope of developing a relationship with the New York City Department of Transportation and the bicycle community at large.

“The Department of Transportation and The New School could develop a relationship where students design real-world projects while improving the streets and communities of New York City,” Brinen said. “This prototype definitely has the potential to create other design-build projects with New York City institutions and The New School.”

The Bicycle Amenities Station project consists of three faculty members and 12 students who will soon meet to discuss design and build the stations. Brinen and his colleagues come from various disciplines at The New School and hope to develop a design-build prototype by the end of the academic year, in time for the 2013 Parsons Design Festival. The project’s total budget is currently $5,000.

“The chance to actually build was really enticing, considering there are few chances in school to actually collaborate, design and then build something that could actually exist in the city as something that is used by the public,” said Parsons senior and architecture major Linda Xin, a participant in the Bicycle Amenities project. “We get through the design stage, [and] sometimes the prototype, but rarely to the building and actual use of the thing we designed. To know that what we design must soon be built and then used is a different story.”

The New School launched the Green Fund in the spring of 2010 to encourage community involvement in the New School’s Sustainability Pledge. Students and faculty can create their own projects, like Brinen’s, which aim to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, water usage and waste throughout The New School. The Green Fund offers as much as $50,000 per year to selected students and staff, with each project allotted a maximum of $10,000.

Since its inception, the Green Fund has contributed to a number of sustainability projects at The New School. Projects have focused on the reduction of electricity use in relation to lighting at the university, the implementation of waste sustainability signs posted around campus buildings, and the creation of a contraption that can generate electricity through the breakdown of algae.

“I think it’s important to make sure that we’re supporting ways that the students can contribute to the campus,” said Gwen Kilvert, the university’s assistant director for sustainability and energy management. “We hope that, in some cases, the Green Fund will launch pilot projects that can be institutionalized.”