NEW YORK—Over 30 bikers stood outside New York University’s Seventh Street “Green House” residence hall in 30 degree weather at noon on Sunday, Nov. 23, ready to kick off the launch of a new Bike Share program with an 11.5-mile ride from Manhattan to Brooklyn.
The inaugural ride will stay strictly on bike lanes, going south from Lower Manhattan, over the Manhattan Bridge through Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza, and then back to Manhattan over the Williamsburg Bridge.
The Bike Share program will allow students to reserve bikes online for three hours at a time during the weekdays and six hours on weekends. Students can then swipe their ID cards at selected bike racks to unlock and retrieve them.
Thirty single-speed Birias bikes were purchased with a $13,000 grant from the Sustainability Task Force at NYU. The grant was awarded in April and the bikes were purchased shortly thereafter, but technological aspects of the program set back the launch date.
Lindsi Seegmiller, a student at NYU’s College of Arts and Sciences, and Tim McNerney and Jennifer Refat, Tisch School of the Arts graduate students in Interactive Telecommunications, had been working on researching and developing a “smart bike rack” since this summer.
The program started as an idea that McNerney and Seegmiller used in a class project. Seegmiller then developed it as a proposal for a “Green Grant.”
The prototype was initially scheduled to begin in September, at the beginning of the fall semester, but the computer system is still under construction. McNerney expects the system to be done by January, but there may be fewer students willing to ride bikes during the winter. He hopes to launch a full bike share program by spring.
Seegmiller and Refat say that, ideally, the program will expand and there will be bikes available in the dorms farthest from campus.
“The idea is to show that there is interest,” McNerney said of the pilot program.
Currently there are only 30 bikes distributed between the Seventh Street dormitory and Tisch Hall on West 4th Street. If the pilot program is successful, perhaps they can apply for a grant that will provide enough bikes for NYU’s 50,000 students, some living in dorms well over 20 blocks from Washington Square Park.
“I’m planning on getting a bike,” Meldin Jeng, NYU Freshman said. “Until then I’ll use [the bike share] a couple of times a week to go to work or just explore the city.”
The inaugural ride will stay strictly on bike lanes, going south from Lower Manhattan, over the Manhattan Bridge through Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza, and then back to Manhattan over the Williamsburg Bridge.
The Bike Share program will allow students to reserve bikes online for three hours at a time during the weekdays and six hours on weekends. Students can then swipe their ID cards at selected bike racks to unlock and retrieve them.
Thirty single-speed Birias bikes were purchased with a $13,000 grant from the Sustainability Task Force at NYU. The grant was awarded in April and the bikes were purchased shortly thereafter, but technological aspects of the program set back the launch date.
Lindsi Seegmiller, a student at NYU’s College of Arts and Sciences, and Tim McNerney and Jennifer Refat, Tisch School of the Arts graduate students in Interactive Telecommunications, had been working on researching and developing a “smart bike rack” since this summer.
The program started as an idea that McNerney and Seegmiller used in a class project. Seegmiller then developed it as a proposal for a “Green Grant.”
The prototype was initially scheduled to begin in September, at the beginning of the fall semester, but the computer system is still under construction. McNerney expects the system to be done by January, but there may be fewer students willing to ride bikes during the winter. He hopes to launch a full bike share program by spring.
Seegmiller and Refat say that, ideally, the program will expand and there will be bikes available in the dorms farthest from campus.
“The idea is to show that there is interest,” McNerney said of the pilot program.
Currently there are only 30 bikes distributed between the Seventh Street dormitory and Tisch Hall on West 4th Street. If the pilot program is successful, perhaps they can apply for a grant that will provide enough bikes for NYU’s 50,000 students, some living in dorms well over 20 blocks from Washington Square Park.
“I’m planning on getting a bike,” Meldin Jeng, NYU Freshman said. “Until then I’ll use [the bike share] a couple of times a week to go to work or just explore the city.”
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