Engineer Shifts Gears To Create Bicycling Think Tank
By Donna Gordon Blankinship
Bill Moritz has a year to turn his passion for bicycling into a career. That's how long the University of Washington is giving the 48-year-old electrical engineer to create a Center for Human Powered Transportation.
The bicycling think tank would be a clearing house for information about bicycle transportation, a center for research on urban planning and nonmotorized travel, and a place for government officials and future urban planners to learn how to make cities more bicycle friendly.
Moritz, who commutes by bicycle every day, says the University of Washington in Seattle is a perfect setting for this one-of-a-kind project. The university is known for its urban planning, transportation and engineering departments and Seattle is one of the top bicycling cities in the world.
The Bullitt Foundation gave Moritz a $10,000 grant to fund his initial research and to help him attract more money to set up the center. His goals for the year of his sabbatical are to raise $200,000 in private and public grants and to create a university course in bicycle transportation.
Moritz thinks there is a huge potential for encouraging more people to commute to work by bicycle. "People already have the equipment and the basic skills, but they lack the education and skills to ride in traffic," he said. Employers, government officials and automobile drivers are other groups he says need more bicycling education.
One of his goals is to offer workshops for civil engineers, urban planners, transit officials and landscape architects to train them to design, build and maintain bike and pedestrian paths. And because Moritz says many planners and engineers do not ride bikes, he wants to take them out on two wheels and let them experience "bicycle heaven and bicycle hell" for themselves.
Moritz remembers complaining to a government official about the new surface on a bike trail, and the official replied that it looked OK to him. But when the official took the initiative to get on his bike and ride the trail, he recognized the problem and promised to do a better job of supervising trail construction in the future.
Moritz asked for a sabbatical to pursue the think tank because it seemed like a natural progression from his experience as a bicycling activist and a university professor.
When Congress in late 1991 passed the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act, which allocates money that can be used specifically for bicycling projects, Moritz knew the timing was right for more research on nonmotorized transportation. A local newspaper article about the proposed Center for Human Powered Transportation was picked up by The Associated Press and his phone hasn't stopped ringing since.
He says he has no intention of going back to teaching electrical engineering after his sabbatical ends next fall. "I'm going to succeed or I'm going to die trying."