Logo by Jeff Horton of Commuter Services of North Florida

Several years ago my alma mater Florida State University attempted a spectacularly unsuccessful bike-sharing program (click here for more on bike sharing).  They painted a number of bikes a bright yellow and then set them in various locations around campus, unlocked.  The idea was that students would use them to get from one building to another and then leave it for someone else to use.  The problem was the organizers ignored (1) accountability and (2) all the hills that make Tallahassee so topographically different from the rest of the state.  First the bikes collected at the bottoms of hills, then they were stolen.

Universities are nothing if not places of rejuvenation.  Any student involved with that first effort is long gone but the institutional memory of the failure remains.  That means new students can come along to try again but old voices will still be around to point out what did not work the last time.

Enter Sandy Simmons a student and student senator at FSU.  His Big Idea was reCycle, a bike rental program composed of the skeletal remains of abandoned bicycles on racks in front of dorms.  It turns out Florida Statute 705.18 prevents the use of any abandoned property on state property and the abandoned must be sold at a public auction each year. Even though the abandoned bikes were not available, they still pointed in the right direction.

Looking for donations Sandy then placed 50 flyers around campus asking students to donate their used bikes.  Sandy says “most of the bikes we got were bikes that students were going to throw out anyway, so we only got about 5 usable bikes from donations last spring. Since reCycle was still a brand new program, and we weren’t renting bikes to anyone yet, we knew that most students probably would not want to donate their bikes until they saw that the program was legitimate and that we weren’t just selling their bikes to pawn shops.”  He also appealed to Commuter Services of North Florida, a commuter assistance program funded by the state, which came up with the money for 12 more bikes.  reCycle was born.

Some students only need the bikes for a semester or so.  It is pretty clear they don’t always follow the student elsewhere.  So the reCycle program works on a semester basis.  The cost is only $20 per bike per semester and the rental is tied to the student’s account—no bike at the end of the semester, no grades and no graduation until the program is reimbursed.  Through more donations each student gets a bike helmet, backpack, and information and student government came up with the money to buy locks for all the bikes as well.

All 17 bikes were rented within 3 minutes of them being offered and there are 50 people on a standby waiting list if a one comes available.  Sandy collected $340 that will be used for repairs at the end of the semester and he hopes there will be more donations.

The most important lesson to take out of the reCycle program is not to let past failures get in the way of a new approach.  “I have heard about FSU’s previous attempts at a bike sharing program hundreds of times,” Sandy says.  “Almost every single time I pitched my idea to a faculty or staff member, they would always bring up the bike program that was started here five or six years ago which did not work out well at all.  But, he adds, “it’s worth it to put your time and effort into implementing the idea all the way through, even if you have someone at every turn telling you that it will never work.”