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BY MENGHAN JIN

In print | Published April 1, 2010

The college will soon launch a Bike Share program to provide students with the opportunity to rent out one of 10 available bicycles from McCabe Library for his or her own personal use.

It is not yet clear when the program will begin, but former Student Events Advisor Angela Meng ’12, who created the program with Student Council president Rachel Bell ’10, said that it will start sometime this month.

The idea first surfaced at the student activities fair during freshman orientation last semester. Bell and Meng wanted to make it more convenient for students to get around campus and elsewhere.

All around the world, similar programs have already been implemented on college campuses, said Russell Meddin, an advocate for bike sharing programs and representative of Bike Share Philadelphia who spoke on campus Sunday as part of the GREENmarch campaign.

According to the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, over 75 campuses in the United States alone have bike share programs with no cost to borrowers. These include Carleton College, Pomona College and nearby Drexel University.

“For me, it’s really annoying walking everywhere,” Meng said. “This was when Target was kind of far, so if you didn’t make the Target shuttle, then you couldn’t really walk there and so that really made me very interested in increasing the mobility of students.”

Talking to several students last semester about the possibility of a bike share program, Meng received positive feedback. “They expressed interest in renting out these bikes when it’s a nice day outside for a bike ride or for running errands to a local pharmacy or store,” she said.

After the Student Budget Committee approved their proposal, Bell and Meng bought six secondhand bikes from Chester Neighborhood Bike Works and four from Swarthmore Cycles. With funding from SBC, they then sent the bicycles to Lindsay Yanez, owner of Swarthmore Cycles, for repairs.

“I think that I have a responsibility as a business owner of Swarthmore, especially when a large number of my customers are Swarthmore students, to help a program like this get off the ground,” Yanez said.

Yanez will also take an active role in this program by maintaining the quality of the bikes. “She agreed to do a complete tune-up each semester, labor for additional repairs, reasonable availability for emergency repairs and on-campus safety inspection of bikes bi-monthly for a fixed cost of $250 a semester with a $150 retainer for parts,” said Bell and Meng’s SBC proposal.

The program will rely on a system centralized in McCabe where keys to the locks of these bikes will be available for check-out for two days, Meng said. The locks, as well as helmets, were donated by Kwai Kong ’86, current president of a bike company in California.

Before obtaining the key to the bike, students will need to sign a contract. “When a student checks out the bike, we also have the student sign a brief contract outlining his/her fiscal responsibility if he/she damages the bike in certain ways or lose the key,” the proposal said. There is also a five dollar per day late charge.

In order to lower the risk of bike theft, Steven Palmer, machine shop supervisor of the physics and astronomy department, will be fashioning little metal license plates for each bike, Meng said. Palmer will weld “Swat” onto the plates as well as a unique name given to each bike to distinguish one from the other.

“The purpose of the plates is that they’re going to be difficult to take off and so that when they get stolen, the plates will still be on the bikes so they’ll be easily identifiable,” Meng said.

Though stolen bikes have been an issue in the past, she believes that it will be a crippling problem in the Bike Share program, since all bikes will be kept at bike racks behind Parrish when not in use. By signing the contract, students are also responsible for paying $75 if their checked-out bike is stolen.
“The good thing about Swat students is that they are pretty conscientious,” Yanez said. “I don’t think that they’re going to destroy a bike.”

Meddin expressed optimism for Swarthmore’s program. “I am definitely pleased and excited to hear that a local school is putting up a bike sharing program. … Anything to make it easier for students to get around campus is good and anything to wean students from using automobiles is even better,” he said.

Because Meddin advocates for a public bike sharing program in which bicycles are made available to the entire Swarthmore community, Bell and Meng have not been collaborating with him about their program which will only be offered to students.

“We don’t share the same logistical idea of what we can do for this program. As of now, we haven’t really worked together,” Meng said.

Currently, Bell and Meng are waiting on the completion of the bike plates before initiating the Bike Share program. They hope to run the program for a year and then reassess and tweak it if necessary.

“I really do hope that it is a success among students because I know that there’s been expressed enthusiasm and interest in the program,” Meng said. “To me, I feel like students would appreciate this.”

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