The commute from Rodin College House to the David Rittenhouse Laboratory may soon get a lot shorter, thanks to a campus-wide bike-sharing program that may come to Penn in the fall.
The Undergraduate Assembly plans to start the service at Hill College House and eventually expand it to other parts of campus.
The bike-sharing program may be modeled on existing services elsewhere. “Yale, Princeton, NYU, Harvard, and the list goes on, have all successfully created a bike-sharing programs,” UA representative and rising College junior Chris Cruz wrote in an email.
Penn’s program could be based on a Parisian bike-sharing service that features a card-swiping system to access bicycles at many stations, according to UA Treasurer and rising College junior Jake Shuster.
“Details are still being worked out, and a few different options are currently being considered,” Shuster wrote in an email. “The program may come out of different college houses, or could be part of a city-wide bike share program. Students could likely borrow bikes for minimal charges or for free.”
Former UA College representative and rising College junior Zeke Sexauer helped propose the bike-sharing service last summer. “I see the bike share program at Penn as essentially a greener and more flexible alternative to transportation than the other options currently available to Penn students,” he wrote in an email.
He noted that using a bike-sharing service could be cheaper, faster and simpler than using other modes of transportation. For example, a subway stop may be blocks away from a destination, taxis are expensive and buses follow schedules, he wrote.
A bike-sharing service could be available in areas not serviced by other options of transportation. Sexauer cited a recent incident when he and a friend decided to “take a series of buses, which proved to be extremely difficult, as we got on the wrong buses, missed transfers, and couldn’t find stops” because the area that he wished to visit was too far to walk to and “not within traditional taxi-taking territory.”
Whether there is enough interest to justify starting a bike-sharing service remains uncertain. A survey sent to members of UA Steering Committee asked, among other questions, whether members would consider using the service.
Rising College sophomore Victoria Koc said she would “probably not” use a bike-sharing program at Penn.
Wharton and Engineering senior Junxu Lye already has a bicycle, but said he would consider using a bike-sharing program.
“Firstly, it would prevent bike theft,” he said. “The second thing is that … it’s nice to not have to care about maintaining your bike.”
Rising College sophomore Elizabeth Thom did not use the bike-sharing program offered last semester at Fisher Hassenfeld College House, where she lived.
“I like to run, so biking isn’t necessary,” she said. But she said that “for some people, it’d be nice to bike along the river or into Center City.”
Another of the UA’s ongoing projects, unrelated to the bike-sharing project, addresses the University’s bicycle policy. A paper presented at the UA General Body Meeting last September argued that bicyclists should be able to use popular Penn walkways, such as Locust Walk, during some daylight hours.
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