Getting to campus just got easier.
At the UCLA bike shop, located in the Wooden Center, students can now rent bicycles that come with a helmet, U-lock and front and rear lights for $35 per quarter.
The idea came from a former graduate student who proposed the idea of a bike library after realizing he needed a way to get around, said David Karwaski, UCLA Transportation planning and policy manager.
“Students buy a bike to get around, but when you’re done with your studies, you end up not taking the bike with you,” Karwaski said. “What ends up happening is there’s a lot of abandoned bikes at the end of the academic year. It’s good for the students because it’s a useful addition to mobility on campus.”
Loaning out bicycles allows students to get the resources they need for a short period of time, while cutting down abandoned bicycle numbers, he added.
The funding for the program came mostly from The Green Initiative Fund at UCLA, which granted $24,300 to the bike shop for the project, according to the initiative’s website. Students pay $4 a quarter in student fees to the initiative, which allocates funding to groups that propose projects to reduce UCLA’s negative environmental impact.
The money was used to build a bike cage in Parking Structure 4 to store the 50 bikes that were purchased for the program, Karwaski said.
The initiative’s grant also paid for the bikes, U-locks and lights, said Sarah Beth Thompson, Outdoor Adventures program coordinator. She added that the bike library does not make a profit but is self-sustaining from the money received from customers and the initiative’s funding, which the program can reapply for quarterly.
About 15 out of 50 bikes have been rented out so far this quarter, Thompson said.
“Mostly, advertising comes from word of mouth,” she said. “We did have some cool press on blogs, and we had a booth at the sustainability fair as well.”
Anne White, a psychology graduate student who lives five miles from campus, recently rented a bike and said she was thrilled when she heard about the program.
“I priced it out, and the cost of buying a new bike would be like renting one for a couple years,” White said. “I had bought a bike off Craigslist when I first got here (from Alaska), and it kept falling apart. I kept taking it back to the bike shop weekly to get it fixed, and that’s how I found out about this program.”