Jonathon Weber ’13 hit the jump hard. His small bike rose straight off the pile of dirt and for half a heartbeat he hung suspended in the air at the Maple Street Bike Park in Essex, Vermont. “That was fun,” he said quietly, a few minutes later. “Sometimes I wipe out, but there’s value in falling down and getting up again.”
Near the entrance to the park, Nathan Lantieri ’19 and Olivia Janggen ’19 watched riders on BMX and mountain bikes flowing and bumping over the dirt track. “This is very cool,” said Lantieri. “You can read stuff and look at pictures—but to actually see it makes it real.”
These two students were here in Essex last spring as part of their work in Community Development and Applied Economics 295, Local Community Initiatives. Their semester-long assignment: serve as consultants to Weber and other volunteers who have formed a group that aims to build a park like this one within Burlington.
What the students learned is the community value of some carefully placed piles of dirt. “Our data shows a lot of interest,” said Janggen. She and Lantieri and two other classmates designed a survey that reached 890 people and “almost every one of them was positive about having a bike park in Burlington,” she said.
For the students’ instructor, Thomas DeSisto ’01 G’11, and the volunteers, the end point is not the park—it’s how bike parks, sometimes called pump tracks, bring together lots of people in the same way that neighborhood gardens, skateboard parks, and swimming pools do. “To create something new, you need lots of kinds of capital,” DeSisto said. “In my course, students partner with organizations in Burlington to help build social capital. I want them to think about the meaning of human capital.”
Fall 2018, the bike park group has been in conversation with Burlington parks and recreation staff to see if they can find a suitable location in the city. As student Nathan Lantieri put it: “It’s great to learn about things in the classroom, but it’s even better to apply them in the world.”
—Joshua Brown, story and photography