Advice on establishing a bike share program

Indiana University has just announced that they are starting a bike share program that will be 100% student managed. They are starting with 10 bikes in January and adding another 50 in May. As Bloomington is trying to get Platinum designation with the Bike League, this is a big deal! They indicate that this is the first student led initiative like this.

The student government has reached out to the local club (of which I'm a director) and the city (where I serve on the Platinum designation task force) for help and guidance in getting this going.

I'm inclined to provide some assistance to them, but no one locally seems to have any direct experience with this.

Does anyone have any experience with this and/or tidbits of wisdom to offer in helping the student government get this off to a successful start?

You might want to talk to these folks: http://www.capitalbikeshare.com/.

I have a friend who works for them and they seem to know what they are doing.

Good luck and good work!

Here is a link to a paper that U of M in Ann Arbor did,

http://www.graham.umich.edu/pdf/envi...harereport.pdf

Not sure if they are currently doing the program, I heard talk about it going on but don't know how successful it is. They are doing the same with with smart cars, you buy a pass and use a car in designated places around town for short runs and errands.

Plan should include how to get bikes physically back to the central parking areas for bikes, in case users abandon them at their destination.

Or is this a time-based, fee-based system? Will bike have a GPS system to track them down?

I hope the students will do abit of research. Not just google aimlessly ...they have to go into hard core databases where these studies are stored. Google does not dip into proprietary research databases.

I look forward to hearing how this goes. The only bike advocacy at all around here has been from the Truman State students and they might be interested in doing something like that. They already run a bike co-op because there is no local bike shop.

Thanks for the replies. This helps me frame up some perspective on the issues. I'm still getting more info and let you know what I find out.