by Scottie Barsotti
Civil and Environmental Engineering doctoral candidates Kenedy Sánchez and Hosea Santiago-Cruz created a new student-led service on campus, fostering community, connection, and confidence for CMU cyclists.
Carnegie Mellon has a strong cycling culture, with many students, faculty, and staff biking to campus or simply riding around Pittsburgh for exercise and recreation. In recent years, the university has invested in making campus more accessible and safer for cyclists and pedestrians alike with new policies, maps and bike paths, infrastructure, and dismount zones. Still, for some students, something core was missing.
For Kenedy Sánchez and Hosea Santiago-Cruz, that “something” missing was community. They founded the Tartan Bike Project (TBP) at CMU to change that.
The two Ph.D. researchers in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) are members of the same lab and share an advisor: Greg Lowry, department head and professor of civil and environmental engineering. As friends and lab mates, they both discovered that the other was an avid cyclist and had been involved in student-led bike co-ops during their undergraduate years—Sánchez at University of Texas at Austin and Santiago-Cruz at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez.
