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Spotlight: Picnic Day 2008

Plan ahead for weather, parking and eating

The Picnic Day Board has been working to make this year’s event a great experience for all the expected 50,000 visitors. They offer the following advice for you to think about before you leave your home for the event:

If it rains

As veterans of past Picnic Days know, the big day proceeds no matter what. If the weather threatens to rain, bring your umbrellas ... we can verify that the parade is still a lot of fun even when it gets (a little) wet.

In addition, the Picnic Day operations chief, Christopher Chin, has made plans to move most of the events indoors close to where they have been planned for outdoors, assuming we have a sunny day.

“The animal events will be canceled, unless they are indoors already,” he says. That means the dachshund races are still on!

Rain plan

Avoid a parking snarl

Unitrans buses will be running throughout Davis on Picnic Day and will stop at the campus Bus Terminal on Howard Way.

The Unitrans Picnic Day schedule (PDF)

Once you are on our campus, the largest in the University of California system, you can take a free shuttle. Shuttles will run through campus during Picnic Day. Times and routes will be found on the official Picnic Day Web site’s Schedule of Events.

Bring your own utensils

Do your part to help UC Davis promote its Zero Waste Program by bringing your own mugs, water bottles, utensils and plates when you arrive at the Quad for sustenance.

“As an incentive, we will be giving away coupons for free drinks to the first 200 people with their own mugs,” says Sarah Koplowicz, Zero Waste coordinator for Picnic Day and a student assistant with the R4 Recycling program at UC Davis.

And if you forget to bring your own, look for the food booths with signs for biodegradable dishes, cups and utensils. These will be made out of cornstarch and suitable for compost bins that will be placed strategically throughout the Quad.

UC Davis has been promoting the Zero Waste Program since 2004 as part of a UC-wide pledge to decrease waste by 75 percent by 2012.

“UC Davis is the leader of all the UCs, with an average diversion rate of 95 percent,” Koplowicz says.

Rather than have campus waste going to the landfill, the campus is striving to divert it to recycling or composting.