The concept of bike sharing is attractive to most folks. Who wouldn’t want to be able to check out a bike from a conveniently-located kiosk, ride it to where they need to go, and check it back in at their destination?
However, the logistics of bike sharing on a large scale can be more tricky. The most well-known worldwide effort is Paris’ Velib, while there have been domestic attempts in Minneapolis, Denver (check out the slick Bcycle video below), Washington, D.C., and Austin, among others. Some are corporate, some are non-profit, some work well, some have struggled, and there are as many different models as there are cities that have attempted the concept. Speaking broadly, the largest challenges are keeping up with bike maintenance and dealing with theft.
Here in Champaign-Urbana, large-scale bike sharing hasn’t caught on. The U of I’s Department of Kinesiology has a small, successful program for faculty, staff, and visitors, but they’ve specifically avoided serving the student population in order to keep their bike fleet manageable. In the couple of years I’ve been in town, I’ve heard of a couple of bike-sharing startups (and The Bike Project actually began as a bike-kiosk-sharing idea), but nothing has really caught hold.
That may be where Grab-a-Bike Illinois (link under construction) comes in. The organization, recently established as an RSO, is an undergraduate engineering class project designed to provide bikes on demand on campus.
Rebekah Zale is Grab-a-Bike’s promotional director, and she describes the program as planned: “How it would work is, you’d swipe your ID card or some other form of identification if you aren’t a student, and it will release one of the bikes from a stand. And you could ride the bike for a couple of hours or wherever you needed to go, and then there’d be another stand for you to put it in when you got there. Theoretically, it’d all be powered by solar panels and it’d all be totally green. It would be for the Champaign-Urbana community and the campus.”
The Grab-a-Bike program is in its infancy, and is really looking for funding and feedback more than anything right now. “This semester, our goal is to make a prototype,” Zale stated. “A lot of people are saying, ‘That’s a great idea, but we’d like to see a prototype before we give funding,’ but we can’t make the prototype without the funding. We’re in a little bit of a pickle.”
So, with their newfound RSO status, they hope to get enough funds to complete a prototype by the end of the semester. The prototype would be an example of the “actual physical system,” according to Zale, which would include a locking mechanism and computer inventory system that would be created by the students. “Our main concern is theft, and making a smart locking system,” Zale noted.
According to Zale, the bikes used for the project would be likely be single-speed Trek cruisers with coaster brakes and fenders, much like the bike pictured at the top of this article. The simplicity of design and rugged construction will hopefully keep maintenance to a minimum.
So, Grab-a-Bike is quite some distance from any sort of wide implementation. They’d like to know whether this idea is something that a wide cross-section of people would be interested in, and how best to implement it. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments, and if you’d like more information about Grab-a-Bike, you can contact Rebekah here.