Bicycles

by Bryce Limbacher and Joshua Poznanski

Genesis of the Oread Bicycle Club

The first bicycle club at KU, the Oread Bicycle Club, was born in 1890 as a part of the bicycle boom. It remained active until 1925.

Renaissance of the Mount Oread Bicycle Blub

Students reformed the club in 1967, as a local manifestation of the "ten-speed bicycle boom," which promoted cycling for adults for moral, social, sporting, and environmental reasons. "The Mount Oread Bicycle Club Newsletter" began publication in December 1971.

The 10-Speed Crescendo

As the decade goes on we see the club and the newsletter grow. They start to take on columns form other schools and states and the issues grow in size.

The newsletter promoted local bike tours and races, expanding to include events further afield, such as the 1977 Grand Tour of Oklahoma, pictured here.

The news letter eventually becomes so large that it is more like a newspaper and becomes on called the "Mid American Cyclist", and takes on quite the following.

While the main newsletter is still published at the same rate, "Quick Releases" (hitherto an infrequent occurrence, whose title is both a type of lever that makes removing or repairing part of a bike and an apt description of a rapid bit of news) were now published one or two times between each larger publication - during the school year, that is. Some of these "Quick Releases" are as long as seven pages front to back.

While prevalent throughout the entire 70s we can see the beginnings of a shifts away from purely hardcore road racing and towards cyclocross, time trials, and most notably touring

It Is at this point that membership shows its first indications of beginning to dwindle. The beginning of the 77-78 school year shows approximately half the membership of previous years

A State of Ennui?

Bicycles take a very minor role on the college campus throughout the 2000s and early 2010s;

A Phoenix from the Ashes

In the spring of 2016 an urban planning transportation implementation class (UBPL 757) partnered with the KU Bicycle Advisory Committee to generate a bike plan.

The bike plan was intended to propose methods for improving Transportation in Lawrence and on campus. Several impacts of this were: the unification of resources onto a single website ‘bike.ku.edu’; construction of free bike maintenance stands found in locations around campus such as outside the Ambler Recreation Center; and the implementation of a bike registration system. A survey of university students lead to the introduction of a bike share program on campus in fall 2018. Unfortunately, the bike share program was axed by the company operating it due to the economic impacts of the SARS-COV-2 pandemic.

The sole remaining campus affiliated bike club has no common lineage with the Mount Oread Bike club of the 60s 70s and 80s.

Today the modern cyclist is not the adventurous soul of the 70s and 80s but once again the avid sportster of the 1890s.

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