Campus Community Bike Program

This comes under "Good News and Bad News"...maybe. My university just instituted a campuswide "community bike program" which I'm both excited and tentatively worried about. Here are the details from our website:

New Community Bike Program
If you notice bright yellow bicycles on campus, go for a ride, it's yours! Recreation and Sports Services is now providing bicycles for the UWF community to commute on campus.
Each bike has a sticker explaining its purpose: “I am a UWF Yellow Bike. Take me for a ride on campus, leave me at a rack for anyone else.” The bikes have been renovated by the Cycling Club and Outdoor Adventures, but once they’re on the racks they literally belong to anyone wanting a quicker commute across campus.
The Yellow Bike Program includes opening a campus bike shop for community members to donate bikes, learn to fix their own bikes, pay for repairs, or purchase renovated bikes.

What a cool idea! I especially like it because I live too far away to bike-commute to campus, but now I may be able to use a yellow bike to ride around the campus when I'm there.

The bad news is that I'm a little concerned about theft. I mean, these are not high-demand type bikes, but bikes that were abandoned around campus, collected, and refurbished, plus they have that highly-identifiable bright yellow paint. But a campus is not a gated community, so who knows where these bikes might end up? I know the students have put a lot of volunteer time into ramping up this program, so I'd hate to see the results vanish. Have any of you seen this kind of program work well on another campus?

My Director has mentioned these types of programs that he has seen in Europe and I've half expected him to create a similar program for use by campus residents (I work in Housing). He hasn't yet moved in that direction - for the reasons you've stated...he's afraid of theft - but I wouldn't be surprised if he decides to try it one of these days.

Thats pretty cool, I just hope that no one decides since the bikes are community property that they can trash them.

Paris is doing something sort of similar.... http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...032301753.html

What a great idea!!!
At a local park not too far away, they have something similar. Odds and ends "leftover" bikes that are painted blinding orange, left at a rack for anyone to ride on the trails. Granted, the chains are creaky, and they're not the smoothest ride, but it's great for those that want to ride them around. As far as I know- they've been left alone.

Crossing fingers that the program takes off at the college and people respect the use of the bikes!

That is such a neat idea!

Copenhaguen and Helsinki have city bike programs, too:

http://members.aol.com/humorme81/citybike.htm
http://members.aol.com/humorme81/helsinki.htm

In both cases, the bikes are locked with a coin and they have some sponsorship.

Maybe paint them multi-colors instead of solid yellow. Neon pink and fluorescent green?

People like yellow

Quote:

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Originally Posted by zencentury

Maybe paint them multi-colors instead of solid yellow. Neon pink and fluorescent green?

People like yellow

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I like my yellow bike :) I'd better watch out for;
"hey! that's my bike you ..."
"I'm from Hellsinki, I thought it was a city bike" :o

I forget which community has a charge card based system where you pay and then get it back each time you use the bike.

See, that's what I was thinking--yellow is cool. Who wouldn't want a snappy yellow bike? But, I guess we'll just see what happens.

from www.azcentral.com
(this was a program in downtown Phoenix)

The purple bikes
It was such a European concept. In 1997, the thought was to park bicycles at recognizable purple bike racks around the city. Residents could borrow a bike to get where they needed to go, then leave it at another purple bike rack. Worries that people would steal the Purple People Movers, as the bikes were called, were dismissed. "You can't really steal something that is free," a transportation official was quoted as saying. Somebody figured out how. The program started in April. By May, none of the 60 bikes placed around downtown Phoenix could be found. The bike racks were eventually yanked out, or repainted to match downtown's new branding concept, Copper Square. One lone purple bike rack remains outside the Maricopa County government complex. Anyone who still has a purple bike may return it there if they choose.

Elder Daughter's college (Carleton. in Minnesota) had/has a Yellow Bike Program. As far as I could tell it worked just like it was supposed to. I noticed yellow bikes near every building on campus, and the occasional student riding along on one.

Our only thought was that if one had a snazzy bike that happened to be yellow, it would be a good idea to leave it at home and bring something else.

The Carleton bikes are great! My old Quentin Hilltopper, a lovely sparkling lilac beauty, became a yellow bike upon my graduation (I believe the program began in '99 or 2000). The program is wonderful and the few yellow bikes that make it off campus and into town are quickly brought back by other students (or in rare instances the police). In a small town like Northfield, publicizing the program was easy and the bright yellow bikes are pretty obvious when not where they should be -- concerns of theft are pretty minimal.

Yay for expansion of the program!