bikers vs. mosquitos

Today the Daily Illini featured an article about two UIUC students working as "mosquito abatement bikers" for the Champaign-Urbana Public Health District:

As mosquito abatement bikers for the Champaign-Urbana Public Health District (CUPHD), Kathleen Doran, recent graduate of ACES and Claire Keating, a senior in Fine and Applied Arts and Illini Media employee, travel around Champaign County to spread mosquito larvicide to help prevent the coming of West Nile Virus, a disease of the brain transmitted through infected mosquitoes. The CUPHD hired the two students as part of the district’s special program to reduce Culex mosquitos, the insects that cause the disease, said Jim Roberts, director of environmental health for the CUPHD.

Doran and Keating bike around C-U dumping larvacide into stagnant water, thus totally refudiating moquito breeding grounds and helping to fight mosquito-borne diseases like West Nile Virus.  Check out the article!

tuesday, 4 may: c-u's very own bike to work day

If you're not already biking to work -- and, really, it's been so nice out that you should be -- next week's C-U Bike to Work Day might be just the motivation you need to get started.  Next Tuesday, 4 May, a generous group of sponsors (including The Bike Project) will hold our micro-urban shangri-la's celebration of car- and carbon-free commuting.

From 7-10am, C-U Bike to Work Day will have four stations set up around town featuring coffee and other treats for old and new bike commuters.  The stations will be located at

• Downtown Champaign - Neil Street & Main Street
• Downtown Urbana - Main Street & Vine Street
• University of Illinois - Engineering Plaza (Green Street across from the Illini Union)
• Savoy - Savoy Recreation Center (Prospect Avenue and Graham)

You can register for C-U Bike to Work Day here.  You can find out about the third and last in a series of classes on Bike Commuting 101 here.  And if you'd like to volunteer to help staff one of the Bike to Work Day stations, you can sign-up here.

...and you can click here for a great website all about commuting by bicycle!

campus bike project officially open!

Yesterday, we officially opened a new shop on-campus at UIUC.  Located at 608 East Pennsylvania Avenue, the Campus Bike Project shop aims to serve students, faculty, and staff who are loking for inexpensive, low maintenance, and environmentally friendly transportation and don't mind getting their hands dirty in the process.  The new shop's a collaboration between The Bike Project and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 

Here's our press release.  Stop by and see us sometime!

(PS: Here's where we are on a map.)