That is the University’s message to campus bike owners as part of a new initiative to give students clearer information about what to do with their bikes as the school year comes to a close.
“Don’t leave your [bike] because you won’t get it back come September,” explained Jim Lanzi, the Department of Public Safety’s crime prevention coordinator.
The University is concerned that abandoned bikes take up bike rack space, so there is less room for active riders to securely lock up their bikes. Racks filled with abandoned bikes are also not visually appealing, Lanzi noted.
In the past, the University did not have a campus-wide policy for dealing with bikes, but Lanzi explained that the University created one at the start of the school year and distributed authority over bike regulation across several departments, including Transportation & Parking Services, the Office of Community and Regional Affairs, Grounds and Building Maintenance, and Public Safety.
According to the new policy, Public Safety will hold bikes in an impound lot for 90 days before making them available to the U-Bikes program, which repairs abandoned bikes and rents them to students.
Previously, Public Safety held abandoned bikes for six months before offering them to U-Bikes. Six months spent outside was “enough to ruin a bike entirely,” explained Sean Gleason ’09, bicycle programs coordinator and head of the U-Bikes program.
The shorter holding period offers a greater chance that the bikes can be rehabilitated, Lanzi explained, and is more sustainable, as the bikes can be put back into service quicker instead of sitting in the impound lot.
Lanzi said that dealing with abandoned bikes at the end of the year is a costly and time-consuming process. For example, when Public Safety determines that a bike is abandoned, the department must enlist the University’s plumbers to torch the bikes off the racks.
“You’d be amazed at how many man-hours go into [removing] one abandoned bicycle,” Gleason noted.
In addition to its usual arrangement with U-Bikes, the University has also decided to give some abandoned or donated bikes to the Bike Exchange program run by the Boys & Girls Club of Trenton and Mercer County. Volunteers at the program repair the bikes and then sell them at discounted prices.
David Anderson, the executive director of the Trenton/Mercer County Boys & Girl Club chapter, said the University has “always been a good friend” of the chapter.
“It’s a really great cycle, so to speak,” he said. “Here’s an unused commodity that gives something that all kids want: a bike.”
At the end of March, the University donated 25 abandoned bikes to the Bike Exchange, said Kristin Appelget, the University’s director of community and regional affairs.
“The goal of our donations is, to the extent that the bike is still usable ... to get the bike in the hands of someone who could use the bike,” she said. “To me, [that’s] a win-win.”
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