SA Pilots Its New Bike Sharing Program

“I think it is, because I live on South Campus, actually, and I think that if they had more available bikes to bike down from south to here it would be really beneficial,” said Newhouse student Emily Costeles.

With the ability to take a bike for the day, the program gives everyone on campus options for faster, eco-friendly transportation. With any idea, there are logistics to work out.

“It would be hard to like, track who messed up the bikes or, yeah if there was a missing part, or if there’s like flat tires and stuff, if they had like different areas where they could fix the bikes,” Costeles said.

But the program wasn’t implemented over night.

“So the bike sharing program to me is the beauty of the student association,” said Student Association Vice President Joyce LaLonde. “This idea came about three years ago with Daniella Lopez, and then she laid the ground work, Jane Hong last year did all of the leg work and worked really hard on it, and I came on this year to really execute it.”

Those three years allowed SA to plan every part of this idea. Two bikes are stored as replacements, and interested participants need to go through a sign-out process each day. Ten bikes are a part of the program right now, but SA hopes to expand to many more.

“So bikes that you use your hands to pedal with, you know bikes that are used by differently-abled students around campus, and after that, we’ve had a lot of interest. Yesterday was our first day, and all the bikes were shared out,” said LaLonde.

The ten bikes were purchased as a small pilot for this fall. If the program continues to succeed, there could be as many as a hundred bikes in the future.