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CHASTAIN'S
Office Furnishings & Supplies
378 East Broad Street • Downtown
Locally owned since 1979
We have everything you need
from Desks & Chairs to Pens & Paper
706-546-0590 • www.chastains.com
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1650 S. Lumpkin St.
Epps Bridge Pkwy. (Across from Lowe’s)
Athens, GA • 706-546-8915
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MULTlfAMli.r
MANAGEMENT
Scooter-Sharing
Coming Soon to the
VGA Campus?
A shared transportation collective is arriv
ing in Athens—on scooters. Scoot UGA, a
new student organization, is partnering with
ReCycle Scooters to bring fast, economical
and environmentally friendly transportation to
campus.
For an average of $60 a semester, members
of Scoot UGA will have access to 40 scooters
situated throughout campus. Initially, Scoot
UGA will be a campus-based program—two
hours would be the expected maximum use
time and most people would only access the
shared scooters for 10-15 minutes to get
across campus. To start the program, group
founder Peter Ahumada needs at least 100
students to sign up and, he says, if more join,
"the price actually goes down."
"I think we'll get to 100 pretty quickly,"
Ahumada says. Leon Ward, the owner of
ReCycle Scooters, is enthusiastic about the
project. "When the team at Scoot UGA came
to us with the plan, I was 100 percent on
board," he says. "Very often we get students
who are coming to UGA for one semester who
are looking to be able to use a scooter for the
three months they are here. Buying a new bike
[i.e., scooter] is usually out of the question,
and a good used bike is hard to find..."
The program works as a cooperative.
"Basically, everyone is going to buy two-fifths
of the scooter," says Ahumada, a PhD student
at UGA. "We are not a corporation leasing
scooters. We, the students, will own shares of
them." Each participating student will initially
invest $480 to join the program, and will get
some money back when they leave the pro
gram and sell back their shares.
"If you leave Athens in four years, your
scooter will still be running, it will still be
owned by you and you can sell it back to
Scoot UGA for its residual value. I expect that
a student who is at UGA four years will be able
to get half his money back," says Ahumada.
The idea for the scooter collective is based
on other shared transportation programs such
as Yellow Bike projects and the metropolitan
Zipcar program (www.zipcar.com). "I've seen
other similar programs and I know by my own
experiences riding a bike in Athens, that you
really need scooters—not bicycles and not
cars," says Ahumada. He believes that the
hilly terrain makes bicycling more difficult in
Athens compared to other places.
While there are a few kinks to work out
such as parking and gas, the program is well
on its way to being put into practice. "The
cost of gas shouldn't be a problem, but how
to keep the tanks filled up will be," says
Ahumada. Participation is the key to the pro
gram's success.
"Because of the quantity of scooters being
purchased we are able to give the bikes to
Scoot UGA at a discounted price..." says Ward.
"The more scooters we have around Athens
the more people will come to view them as
a viable alternative to automobiles. It's also
a great way for people to experience scooter
riding who normally wouldn't make the full
investment," he says.
"I'm doing this because I want to change
the way transportation is done in Athens and
at UGA," says Ahumada. I think parking lots
are a waste of everyone's grass. Wouldn't it be
nice if UGA were covered in trees and grass
instead of parking spaces?"
Christy Fricks
Delays & More Delays
in Utility Work at
Dudley Park
Sparkly granite boulders the size of Smart
cars are piled in the parking lot of Dudley Park
off East Broad Street. The rock was blasted
out of the ground in preparation for laying
new sanitary sewer pipe that will replace
deteriorated 50-year-old terra cotta and cast-
iron pipes. Other portions of the 18-foot-thick
bedrock—lying only two feet beneath the sur
face in some spots—had to be drilled, filled
with dynamite and blasted without damag
ing surrounding property. It was slow going,
to say the least. This was but one of the
obstacles facing Athens-Clarke County Public
Utilities Department workers and their con
tractors working on this phase of the Upper
North Oconee Interceptor Project, says Glenn
Coleman, the department's assistant director.
Motorists might refer to the project as
a pain in the neck, since this is the second
closing of East Broad Street around the park
entrance. The road reopened for a brief time
after completion of sewer line replacement
at the Trail Creek bridge before being closed
again. Coleman expects the street and Dudley
Park parking lot to have a base coat of asphalt
poured and the street reopened by Sept. 7.
Eventually, more than 12,000 linear feet
of new, larger pipe will replace and extend
the old. The total project, which began at the
Bailey Street wastewater treatment plant and
runs north along the eastern side of the North
Oconee River, will cost $8.7 million. The proj
ect should accommodate growth in the area
for the next 25 years, Coleman says.
Completion of another leg of the project
was delayed by a couple of months after a
short portion of tunneling in the park was not
carried out at the proper slope and had to be
abandoned and refilled, he says. Because this
is a gravity sewer, a constant downhill gradi
ent has to be maintained along the length of
the sewer. (The tunnel was to run along the
river but was rerouted to a different part of
the park in order to minimize environmental
impact, he says.)
"We do not have any cost in it whatso
ever," Coleman says of the miscalculation on
the gradient for the pipe. The mistake, how
ever, added an extra two months to a project
that was to bp completed by late June. The
abandoned portion was filled in and the tun
neling completed Aug. 25.
The third part of this phase is to cross
Oconee/Oak Street with new sewer line, but
that, too, has been fraught with complica
tions. Tunneling was begun there but workers
found "running sand," caused by contact with
ground water from Trail Creek. Instead, the
project will utilize what is called "jack and
bore," in which a piece of equipment on lines
similar to a railroad track pulls the pipe as
it travels under the road. Says Coleman, "If
the jack and bore is successful, traffic on Oak
[Street] shouldn't even know we're there."
Cathy Mong
6 FLAGPOLE.COM • SEPTEMBER 2,2009