Mayor John Hamilton and IU’s Kevin Whited are working on a joint bike share program for Bloomington. The program’s goal is to bring a total of 850 bikes to the city for anyone to use, and it should be completed the spring of 2018 at the earliest.
Bike shares are stands spread around town where you can pay to borrow a bike and leave it at another official bike stand when you are done. These are usually found in large cities, but with IU’s campus, it could be a very popular way to get around. Anyone who has been downtown or on campus can recognize how bad traffic and especially parking can be. This program could improve the flow of roads and could be very beneficial for college students who don’t want to walk everywhere they go.
“It gives another cheap method of transportation that’s also more eco-friendly,” junior Levi Burdine said.
The benefits go beyond being purely environmental, though.
Senior Toudora Galuska said that the bike share “would make [Bloomington] greener, [have] less pollution, [and] get people active,” adding that “biking is really fun too.”
Some people think that there isn’t a high enough demand for alternative public transport in Bloomington compared to big cities. In places like New York, taking other forms of public transport, like buses and subways, can be quite inconvenient whereas here, it isn’t as bad.
Biology and AP Environmental Science teacher Amanda Figolah, although in favor for the bike share, said that she “would be a little concerned about how people would care for the bikes or that [the bikes] would disappear outside of the sharing program.”
Figolah added that Bloomington doesn’t have a lot of bike lanes or safe areas for bikers, so she thinks the city should prioritize making biking safer before implementing the program.
Drury University in Springfield, Missouri has its own bike share program for college students. Students pay a $20 fee at the beginning of the year, and then they don’t have to pay for it again. Drury’s website states that “more than 300 bicycles are ridden on campus annually” and that 25 percent of them are through their bike share program.
