Built for Cars, Banned for Bikes.
SEVENTH COLLEGETHE SYNTHESIS PROGRAM
Introduction
Why is micromobility adoption lower at specific university campuses, and how can we increase its usage to help counter the climate crisis?
We opened expecting theft. It is not theft. A student who owns a scooter still drives, because the campus makes keeping one harder than riding it: nowhere to park, nowhere to charge, nowhere to store.
Bobičić and Esztergár-Kiss sort barriers into micro, meso and macro levels, for cities. The gap: nobody ranks them for a campus. Everything we found is meso: not rider preference, but campus provision.
not a crime problem.
Methods MIXED, 4 SOURCES
The split test. Every headline result is split UC San Diego against everyone else. A finding in one half is a fact about a campus. One that survives both is a fact about micromobility. Cost, $0: public files, a survey form, three of us with timers. Any campus can run this count on itself.
Findings WHAT THE EVIDENCE SAYS
charge or store it
One choice each, 31 asked. Read alone this says theft. The split test says otherwise: all 7 who named theft attend UC San Diego, 0 elsewhere, and nobody in the sample reported an actual theft.
Every single respondent who ever needed campus parking, charging or storage failed to find it. It is the only headline finding that holds on both sides of the split. What they could not find: secure parking 9, storage 2, charging 1.
Library Walk rule
Of the 15 students the rule actually governs. The cheapest problem on this poster to fix, because the fix is a sign.
What we counted FIELD AND MUNICIPAL DATA
Busy did not mean dangerous. The campus with 87 riders logged 20 safety interventions and 5 close calls in 40 minutes, and zero collisions. So did the campus with one rider.
people involved
people killed
Cyclists and pedestrians, in 3,570 collision reports covering 7,145 people, SDPD beats 115, 124, 126 and 932, complete years 2018 to 2025. Our own count from the city file, not a quoted statistic. 9 of the 25 people killed were unprotected.
or signs only
Only 188 of San Diego's 1,976 existing bikeway miles are physically separated from traffic, and 342 of the 556 adopted miles are unbuilt. Computed by us from SANDAG's layers.
The ranking OUR ANSWER
All 7 who named it attend UC San Diego, 0 elsewhere, and nobody reported an actual theft. The remedy for an anticipated loss is a secure place to leave the device. Which is item one.
Significance
per 1,000 car commuters
Shift a tenth of them onto micromobility and 18 tonnes stop being emitted. The climate case does not need a new technology. It needs somewhere to park the one that already exists.
- Actionable. The top barrier is a capital decision a campus knows how to make. The second is a sign.
- Checkable. Three datasets published CC BY-NC 4.0, with a gate asserting every number against one source of truth.
Target audience
- UCSD Transportation Services and HDH. Provision is their decision.
- Associated Students, who could advocate for it.
- Riders and pedestrians, whom it affects.
- Future Synthesis students, via the Project Portal.
Timeline SUMMER SESSION 1, 2026
Forty minutes. Two campuses.
Same instrument, same fixed checklist, counted by us. One campus has a lane, markings, signage, a live speed display, shared bikes, and cars kept out of the core. The other has none of the six.
counted
counted
What is real and what is drawn. The counts, the windows and the provision checklists are our field observations, published as field-observations.csv. The arrivals are spaced evenly across each window for this replay, because we recorded totals, not timestamps. Victor Valley College was observed for thirty minutes, so its window closes before the clock does.
Take a photo of
this square. Then go ride it.