On Monday, Salt Lake City officially launched its new bike share program, GREENbike, in the downtown area. Several U students are hoping that soon they will be able to unveil a similar program on campus.
Dane Jorgensen, a junior in accounting, Steven Athay, a junior in marketing and Yizhou Ji, a junior in accounting, came up with the idea of a bike share at the U for a project in a course they took last Fall Semester. Though the class is over, they are now working with several other students to make their idea, which they call uBike, a reality.
The group submitted a bill to ASUU to gain funding for a promotional campaign that would help them gauge interest in a bike share on campus. As part of the Earth Week festivities, the group will be manning tables, talking to students and passing out fliers to spread the word about their plans Thursday. Jorgensen said they are hoping to gather 1,500 student and faculty signatures to show the U’s administration there is real interest in an on-campus bike share.
Though seeing this project through will require a huge amount of work, Athay feels a responsibility to make his idea into something tangible.
“If we don’t [create this program], who else will?” Athay said. “So many people have group projects or classwork that they work on, where people … all have these good ideas, but don’t act on [them] … To have students on campus who care about it and think it’s a worthwhile thing that we can carry on [and] make a difference on campus for the entire student body would really go a long way.”
This project is not the first campus bike program dreamed up by students.
The senior class of 2009 used their class gift money — combined with some contributions from Commuter Services — to purchase a fleet of about 25 “crimson cruisers” that could be checked out like library books from the front desk of the Union. This program, also called UBike, was not around for long.
“People didn’t really know how to check [the bikes] out … Given lack of administrative support and lack of training for people at the Union desk, the bikes eventually got put in storage in the Union,” said Heidi Goedhart, bicycle coordinator for Commuter Services. “So basically that program … fizzled and completely died out, which is really unfortunate because a lot of time and investment went into it.”
Jorgensen, Athay and Ji were unaware of the older UBike program when they came up with their design for a bike share. Instead, they were drawing inspiration from Ji’s hometown of Hangzhou, China, which boasts the largest bike share program in the world. It was out of pure coincidence that they gave their idea the same name.
Though their project shares a name with the old program, the trio is hoping it will be more user-friendly and successful. Instead of having to pick up and return bikes to one location, the new uBike program would be modeled like the kiosk system in downtown Salt Lake City. Students could potentially pick up a bike after a class, ride quickly to a destination across campus and leave the bike at a different kiosk.
Max Taggart, a junior in biomedial engineering who is involved in planning the uBike program, believes having a bike share on campus would open other students’ eyes to the benefits of cycling.
“When I’m riding around, I don’t know why anyone would choose to walk … because it’s so much faster to ride a bike,” Taggart said. “I think a lot of people haven’t really seriously considered the possibility of using a bicycle to get around on campus … Allowing people to use a bicycle, which is really convenient … at this time in their life, helps them as a student and then they’re more likely to stay on a bike later in life.”
Goedhart, who follows research on biking as part of her job, said research supports this idea.
“A bike share is like a gateway drug,” Goedhart said. “People who probably wouldn’t hop on a bike or don’t have the economic means to have a bicycle stored in their dorm room or apartment can hop on a bicycle in between classes or short trips. [Research shows that] people that start bike commuting while they are in college are more likely to keep that healthy habit … as they grow older than someone who is so used to driving their car … that it seems so far outside the realm of [possibility] to ride a bicycle that they don’t even attempt it. If we try to reach out to people that are kind of malleable in their college years and get them on bicycles, that trend will continue as they age.”
Before the bike share can open for business, there is still a lot of work for the uBike team to do. Athay said creating a cross-campus project will require full integration with the U’s administration as continuing as an independent student group will not be enough.
The bike share will also have to find funding. Currently, they expect to need anywhere between $500,000 and $1,000,000 to create uBike, Jorgensen said. They are hoping that after gaining student and administrative support, they will be able to get funding from a variety of sources, including alumni donations, SKIFF grants and contributions from Commuter Services.
The group is also considering teaming up with Salt Lake City officials to integrate with the GREENbike program.