Our research into mobility at KU since the “Age of Speed” in the 1890s until the present offers a microcosm of major developments in—and attitudes toward—transportation technology. Bicycles offered independence and speed for the self-propelled, ranging from ordinary students to Chancellor Francis Snow, who is depicted in a cartoon from 1899 speeding down Mount Oread with his feet off the pedals of his bicycle.[i] The foundation of the Mount Oread Bicycle Club in 1890 showed how KU students were at the cutting edge of bicycling, just as it began to explode in popularity. The opening of the KU Loop of the electric streetcar in 1910 further augmented campus mobility, by providing an efficient means of getting from downtown to campus and back again. Streetcars were popular with students, but they proved more expensive to maintain and less adaptable than buses, which definitively replaced them by 1933. In the 1920s, meanwhile, cycling also faded in popularity as more and more students could afford cars. In a 1925 letter to parents and students, Chancellor Ernest Lindley bemoaned the presence of automobiles on campus and asked that they be left at home. Cars continued to bedevil campus leaders after the GI Bill brought many more students to campus after WWII. In the late 1940s, law students got practice by adjudicating campus traffic courts, most of which dealt with parking violations. A sample traffic count from 1950 to assess the extent of automotive activity found “3,204 cars crossed the intersection of [Jayhawk Blvd. and Mississippi …] during the busiest 200 minutes of a recent school day.”[ii]

By the end of the 1960s, social, political, environmental, and technological concerns led to a serious reconsideration of the place of cars in society and at KU. In 1964, cars were banned from Jayhawk Blvd during the day, unless they had a special permit reserved for select faculty and administrators. Students reformed the Mount Oread Bicycle Club in 1968 and began publishing newsletters that grew to include events and advocacy from throughout the region. What began as a modest club newsletter in the late 1960s became the Mid-American Cyclist by the mid-1970s, with advertising from Air France and promotion of events throughout Kansas and surrounding states. Student government leaders, meanwhile, worked to expand bicycle racks along Jayhawk Blvd. and to develop a sophisticated campus bus system. Bus ridership grew dramatically in the early 1970s, coincident with the oil crisis, which made gasoline expensive and difficult to purchase. A growing environmental movement, manifested by the first Earth Day and creation of the EPA in 1970, saw local manifestation with the promotion of bicycles and buses instead of cars on campus.

Enthusiasm for cycling faded, however, as the fashion for gas-guzzling SUVs asserted itself in the 1990s. The construction of a new parking garage in 2007/08 helped alleviate somewhat the shortage of parking spots on campus, but parking tickets remain an ever-present danger for drivers hunting a parking spot on campus to this day. A major renovation of Jayhawk Boulevard, begun in 2013 and completed over the following four summers, saw the removal of parking spots along the boulevard altogether, in favor of cyclists, buses, and pedestrians. Students today tend to walk and use the bus system, which has been much improved by the creation of an app to help track the location of buses along their routes, a system brought about in large part by student government representatives in the past decade. The introduction of a bike share program, itself the brainchild of an urban planning class, brought hundreds of blue and red bicycles to campus in fall 2018, but the company responsible for the bikes unceremoniously dumped scores of them in local scrapyards, once the onset of lockdowns in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic meant that hardly any of them were getting any use.[iii] KU’s bus system, meanwhile, like public transportation everywhere, has struggled to help students to feel safe during a global pandemic, though its ridership increased dramatically this past semester with face-to-face classes as the dominant mode of instruction.

Overall, there seem to have been several periods of greater interest in transportation technology and mobility on campus. The original “Age of Speed” from the 1880s to the 1930s, which introduced bicycles, electric streetcars, automobiles (and airplanes) to a world accustomed to horse or steam-powered transportation, elicited a great deal of interest in each machine as it became more widespread on campus. By the 1930s, internal combustion automobiles had become the predominant form of transportation, to the detriment of bicycles, trams, and trains. The early 1970s represented a moment of possibility, as the oil crisis and environmental movement encouraged alternate forms of transport, such as bicycles and buses, but they failed to dethrone the preeminence of the car in a small Midwestern city like Lawrence, KS. Cars only got bigger (and functionally no more efficient) by the 1990s. The past decade could be seen as a reason for hope, as changes to Jayhawk Blvd and the implementation of a campus bike plan have represented efforts to improve mobility beyond cars for people on campus. The prominent landform on which much of campus sits (and for which its first cycling club was named) still presents a challenge students with limited mobility, but students and staff at KU are working to make campus more safe, pleasant, and accessible.[iv] The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged these efforts, but we hope that this current effort will not fade into relative irrelevance as the efforts of the 1970s did. It is clear that student initiatives, whether in the 1890s, 1970s, or the past decade, have made a difference in determining how Jayhawks move.

[i] Clark, “The Chancellor on the Downward Path,” pen and ink, 1899, Douglas County Historical Society Archives.

[ii] University Archives, Parking News Releases and Clippings, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS. 47/3, 1947/48; 1949/50.

[iii] “Pile of bicycles on scrap heap raises questions; bike-share company says it had no choice” Lawrence Journal-World, Apr. 8, 2020.

[iv] https://accessibility.ku.edu/