Pedalmania

BEIJING BY THE BAY
Poised Between Palo Alto and the Foothills, Stanford’s Madcap Bike Scene Has Spun Its Own Cultural Revolution

By David Jacobson
Photographs by Stephen Schauer

“The quadrangle pavement makes a good quarter-mile track; the avenues and boulevards on the campus, and in the surrounding country are peculiarly adapted to the use of the wheel. Good roads the year through make wheeling a constant pleasure.”
­From The Sequoia, a student magazine, Sept. 15, 1892

When bells ring for class change, you can witness something rare in North America. Stand, say, at the Clock Tower. First they trickle past: A shiny new mountain bike with a very serious lock rattling in its frame. Then there’s a solitary beater bike: It may have rolled rusty and squeaking through several student generations; a bike that leaves mechanics in despair and thieves with no appetite.

And then comes the deluge. At peak times, almost 600 bicycles course through these crossroads in just 15 minutes. Despite several near-misses in the melange of unsignaled turns, weaving passes, late-to-class sprints and understandably tentative pedestrians, there are no collisions.

Welcome to Beijing by the Bay, a place where bicycles ­ an average of 15,000 per day ­ rule the roost. They match the peak number of cars one-for-one and dominate the university’s expansive auto-free core, where they carry 70 percent of the visitors to a typical classroom building.

Pedaling is purely practical given that meetings, classes and dormitories are often more than a half-mile apart on a campus of several thousand acres. In addition, on nice days, as many as one out of four faculty, staff and

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