I hear the Student Union is considering a bike rental program.
Well, Paul Balik has a better idea. Why can’t we have a system of bike borrowing? Swipe your ID card at a designated bike rack to borrow a bike. Return that bike within X amount of hours (24? 48?) or pay a fine. It’s totally doable – I’m told that Paris and Copenhagen both have such a system. We can pay for the bikes by raising parking fees by five dollars.
Make driving marginally more expensive to fund a self-sustaining, zero-emissions form of transport. It’s a no-brainer.
Don’t look to Paris for your model — they are a huge city and the cost is pretty high. Hampshire college has the system you’re talking about and they’re relatively closer to our size.
It’s the “yellow bike” system or was when I visited it some four years ago. Basically there are spots in key areas around the school and in the surrounding neighborhood with 4-5 bikes, more for really high traffic areas. Pick it up one place, leave it in another, so long as it’s locked and attached to the appropriate bike rack.
One thing we would need to do is add a bike repair center — someplace that you can drop off a broken bike for problems like flats, gear issues, etc. It’s a pretty simple system, should be able to do it.