In 2008, a campus sustainability group considered a proposal for a student bicycle rental program in hopes of alleviating traffic on campus and offering an alternative to cars.
Four years later, what exists is a small departmental program open only to faculty and staff.
The initial proposal, made in November 2008, called for multiple bike stations to be built around campus. Students would be able to rent a bicycle using a credit card or student ID, ride it and return it to any bike station on campus.
Despite similar successful programs on other college campuses, such as the University of South Florida’s “Borrow Our Bikes” program, UF has not made any plans for expansion.
Scott Fox, director of transportation and parking services at UF, said several factors contributed to the decision to not implement the bike rental program.
“There would have to be a significant amount of labor on the part of the university to move these bikes around and requeue them at the start of every day,” Fox said.
UF’s Sustainable Transportation Working Group thought the project would be too labor-intensive and that bikes might end up in the middle of campus and not around the perimeter where people would want to see them.
Creating a department in charge of maintaining, retrieving and finding space for the bikes required more effort than any department could give at the time.
Transportation at UF is a separate auxiliary service, which doesn’t receive a budget or operating money from the university, the state or Student Government.
UF transportation pays for new programs by trying to get more money from existing sources, Fox said.
Currently, parking decals are the primary revenue source for UF transportation.
In 2008, UF transportation looked into generating revenue for a bike program by raising the price of decals, but transportation and sustainability officials questioned if that was the best use of the extra money.
An increase in student interest could go a long way in making the bike rental program more of a priority, Fox said.
“Students are the ones who said, ‘We want more bus service, we want this SNAP service and we are willing to pay for it.’ That’s where the money came from to enhance those programs and make them a reality,” he said. “What we haven’t seen with the bicycle rental program is someone saying, ‘This is important and we are going to find a way to pay for it’.”
Alex Arias, a 22-year-old materials science and engineering senior, rides his bike to campus. He said the rental program would be helpful to students who live off campus but don’t want to take their bikes on the bus.
“If they could find a way of making it cheap, then it would be a great idea,” Arias said. “I see students using it, but I don’t expect a decrease in fossil fuels.”
The Office of Sustainability set up the Departmental Bike Program in Fall 2011 to prove the concept’s viability at UF, said Stephanie Sims, implementation coordinator of the UF Office of Sustainability.
The program reuses some of the hundreds of bicycles abandoned on campus by students. About 35 of these bicycles are refurbished and used by the Office of Sustainability’s green teams as departmental vehicles. They are available to faculty and staff who need to make deliveries or get to meetings as an alternative to using a state vehicle or their personal vehicles.
“It’s very expensive to start one of the bike-sharing programs as you picture in D.C. or down in Miami,” Sims said. “Unfortunately, there is no easy home for that at UF. With the budget cuts, there is no one that has a whole lot of money to get it started.”
