Wake up 10 minutes before class starts, by the time you finish getting ready you have only six minutes left. The building where your first class is in is a 10-12 minute walk. If you had a bike, you could get there in three to six minutes.
If you are on Busch Campus on the weekend and don't want to wait for a Weekend bus to Livingston, you could bike to Livingston. Likewise, if you live on Cook Douglas and want to go to College Ave, you could bike there instead of taking a 30+ minute walk to College Ave. If someone living in the Busch Suites is at the Rutgers Business School, he or she could bike back to the Suites faster than taking a bus, which goes around Livingston and Busch before arriving at the Suites.
While owning a bike allows for convenient travel, bikes require maintenance and locks and are cumbersome to transport. If you are out of state or an international, bringing your bike from home could be difficult if not impossible. Bike sharing is an innovative transportation program, ideal for short distance point-to-point trips providing users the ability to pick up a bicycle at any self-serve bike-station and return it to any other bike station located within the system's service area. This kind of program differs from traditional bicycle rental services in that it is typically used for short, spontaneous trips that are often combined with other modes of transportation. Many colleges across the country already have bike share programs, including but not limited to Princeton University, Cornell University, University of Maryland, and Penn State.
To utilize a bike, you would need to swipe a card, ride it to the closest bike station to your destination and put it back into the rack. Issues with pricing will be negotiated but typically a yearly membership is bought and there is a certain amount of free-ranging time, usually 30 minutes to an hour. After this allotted free time, a low fixed rate is charged. A bike share is not made for extensive or lengthy rides but rather short monodirectional travel from station to station. Vans will transport bikes between stations when need be to more evenly distribute bikes between stations.
Biking fits well into the Rutgers Transportation system, improving the efficiency of the current bus system at Rutgers by reducing the crowdedness of buses in the morning and early afternoon. Rutgers and the surrounding area already have plenty of bike paths and lanes, which are currently very underutilized. Students could also avoid expensive Lyft and Uber fees since they could bike to different campuses when the buses are not running or are too crowded. Currently, Rutgers University-New Brunswick only has a bike rental program, which requires the user to store, lock and take care of the bike.
Rutgers SEED is partnering with Zagster to bring bike share to the Rutgers-New Brunswick Campus where each campus will contain a select amount of bike stations and bikes. Currently, the biggest challenge is the process of acquiring the necessary funds to establish a pilot program through advertisements and grant applications. In order to make this system a reality, SEED needs your help. If you have an extra 30 seconds, please fill out this survey so that we can plan a pilot program for the bike share.
