Bikes, baby. Bikes.
Yesterday the parking and transit department and ASG of the University of Arkansas announced that it’s making bicycles available to campus folk on a “borrow, ride and return” basis.
Thanks to a donation of seven bicycles by Regions bank, members of the campus community can now sign up for the program, hunt down a bike, use a secret pass-code to unlock the bike and then pop mad wheelies all over campus…or just get to class quicker.
The service is free and registration is at the parking office, in the Administrative Services Building on Razorback Road, or at the Harmon Avenue Garage.
A big thanks should go to Regions for getting things started on this front. Many largers cities provide similar services for residents. It’s great to see something like this in Fayetteville.
Seven bikes is a start, but of course it’s not nearly enough for a campus of thousands. Now if all the other banks in the area could see the benefit of this (moving billboards, anyone?) and donate some bikes, things could really get rolling (hey, I should anchor for KFSM!).
[Via uark.edu]
July 16th, 2008 at 8:52 am
that’s awesome that they’re gonna do this, but those seven bikes are gonna be gobbled up pretty quickly, rendering the usefulness of this service pretty much, well, useless, until they put more bikes in circulation.
but, i might be overestimating people’s willingness to actually use a bicycle. i’m interested to see how this works.
July 16th, 2008 at 8:54 am
The current plan is to have 50 bikes, don’t know how soon ASG plans on expanding to that level though.
July 16th, 2008 at 9:18 am
50 bikes would be great, Michael. However, if the Bank of Fayetteville, Bank of America, Liberty, Simmons, First Federal, Arvest, First Security, Chambers, Signature and Metropolitan National banks would all join in, we could nearly double that.
July 16th, 2008 at 9:40 am
Who wants to bet that they’re not all stolen by Christmas?
July 16th, 2008 at 11:01 am
@Sardon: I was thinking the same thing.
I’ve been hitting the trails a lot recently. If you haven’t ridden Mud Creek and the part of Scull Creek that are open, you need to do it. Today.
Get down to High Roller and get you a bike.
An unfortunate side effect is that I can’t get Queen out of my head.
I Want to ride my Bi-CyCLE, I want to ride my Biiiike. I Want to ride my Bi-CyCLe…
BI-Cycle!
BI-Cycle!
July 16th, 2008 at 1:35 pm
I think the local boobie bars should chip in some bike’s too. They could paint them with nekked ladies and say “Ride me at the Silver Dollar Gentlman’s Club Diamond Caberet” or whatev they’re named now.