One evening, when Melissa Fierke was eight-and-a-half months pregnant, a city bus began to turn as she was crossing the junction of Euclid and Ostrom avenues on her bicycle. Fierke had to swerve to avoid being hit by the bus.

This has happened multiple times to Fierke and other bikers on the road, she said. It happened again last fall, said Fierke an assistant professor at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry and the creator of a bicycle safety committee there. Fierke said she rides her bike to work every day.

“We’re invisible,” she said of cyclists. “If you ride (on) Euclid, you very quickly come to understand that there are two parking lanes — not dedicated bike lanes.”

Fierke, a new member of the Southeast University Neighborhood Association, or SEUNA, attended a meeting at the Erwin First United Methodist Church on Euclid on Monday night. Fierke was one of the community members who shared her thoughts on ways to re-evaluate the current layout of parking and bike paths on Euclid.

The meeting, titled “Imagining Euclid Avenue,” was facilitated by 28 graduate students in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University as part of a class called Collaborative and Participatory Governance.

Tina Nabatchi, an associate professor at Maxwell, teaches the class and said about 50 people were at the meeting at its peak. Attendees included members of landlord associations, homeowner resident associations like SEUNA, student residents, SU faculty and staff, city government officials and others, Nabatchi said.

“With public participation — unless you do an RSVP — it’s really hard to tell if you’re going to get five or 500 (people),” Nabatchi said. “When people hear ‘public meeting,’ they think of that standard format where you have two minutes at the microphone and this is not that model. If people knew (that), they would’ve been a little bit more enticed to come out.”

In the meeting, participants were split into groups at different tables to discuss short and long-term options for rethinking bicycle lanes on Euclid. Five short-term and three long-term options were proposed to a variety of community members.

The next step for the graduate students is to compile the data from the groups and surveys that were passed out and create a report for officials in the city of Syracuse and at SU and SUNY-ESF, Nabatchi said.

“There was an absolute consensus that Euclid Avenue as it is today isn’t working,” said Ed Pincar, a master of public administration candidate who is in Nabatchi’s class.

Pincar led a diverse discussion group of three students, a middle-aged father and an older woman.

“We wanted to make sure that the diversity here at this event was reflective of the diversity in the community itself,” said Amy Goodall-Ayres, another MPA student who led a different group at the meeting.

The logistic team of the class promoted the event on social media, by emails and by fliers. But it was also promoted by word of mouth.

Fierke will continue to call for reforms after the meeting, as she has an online petition to harbor support for the issue. The petition currently has 1,073 of the desired 1,500 signatures and more than 12 pages of comments.

After acquiring all 1,500 signatures, Fierke said it’s a matter of putting the numbers down on paper and SEUNA presenting them directly to Mayor Stephanie Miner, SUNY-ESF’s president Quentin Wheeler and SU’s chancellor, Kent Syverud.

As for the time frame, Fierke is optimistic, saying she’s hoping to have it accomplished by the end of May.

Published on April 22, 2014 at 1:07 am