Eric W-Intent 3
The goal of this Project is to rework the “Blue Bike program” that is in place on campus. I wanted to change the way students had access to bikes on campus and change how the students can currently use them. This would help the students that would have to get across campus faster and also have the potential to have less cars on campus driving around.
Right now there is a program on campus that is called “ Blue Bikes Program” where they fix up old bikes left on campus and allow students to rent these bikes free of charge after filling out an application. One thing I see wrong with this application is that you have to fill out an application in order to get a bike and not every student would fill one out and actually pick one up from the Maine Bound Adventure Center. I think this is a really clever program that gives students access to bikes that would have gone to waste anyway.
One thing I want to implement is that the university would invest in a couple of racks bikes that would be stationed around campus. This would be something that would be very similar to the Citi bikes in NYC and other cities like Boston and Philadelphia. The student would be able to check out these bikes right from the docking station with the swipe of their mainecard. This would allow the school to have a record on who had this bike last and all the student has to do when they are done with the bike is dock it at another docking station. Without your mainecard, the bikes would be locked in place and at no risk of being stolen. I would still keep the free of charge to UMaine students. How this changes the old program is that it brings the bikes to the students instead of the students coming to the bikes. You want to make the life of the student as easy as possible and no extra things they have to do. With my program, all you have to do is swipe your mainecard and your good with a bike either for a joy ride or if you’re late to class a fast track across campus. Ideally, this would encourage students to bike or walk rather than drive across campus which in turn causes more traffic for the commuter students.
The budget on this would be very high for the university at first but I feel this charge could be added to our student activity fees which we pay anyway. Another thing we could do to make money on this is if a person was on campus without a mainecard they could implement a day pass or something that they would pay at a kiosk and the school could gain some of that investment back. I would have to work with campus in order to organize the money and how many and the locations of the stations. To start you would need a minimum of three stations to cover most of campus and this way it would allow student places to dock the bike where ever they are on campus.
3 thoughts on “Eric W-Intent 3”
You must be logged in to post a comment.
I think that this is a great idea in concept and I don’t know if you would actually try to get this to happen but the idea itself is great. A problem that I would have is that there is a long period of time when it is winter at our school and less people tend to want to ride a bikes when it is freezing out. Would the bikes still be accessible in the winter? Have other universities done this before and how successful has it been? You state a few different design ideas that implement mainecards and certain pay passes for non students. What other design features do you think would be beneficial? One question that might arise is how long can you have a bike out for? Many students ride bikes to class so they are usually left outside locked in a standard bike rack. Is there anyway that these bikes can be locked up using a standard bike rack? One idea might be to give people the ability to rent the bike out for the day and have a locking mechanism that allows people to lock it up on any rack. A digitized lock that changes pass codes for every user would be a good idea for the locking mechanism. I am interested to know how much cities charge per bike and for how long? If you want to get the university to invest in this idea showing them that they could potentially make money would be a good idea. You mentioned that people from outside of the university could rent a bike. How much would that cost? If the university was to use an activity fee for this would it raise the price of the activity fee? One idea that could be useful would be to have people who want to use the bike program pay a fee and then have access to all bikes across campus for the semester. That way people who want to use the bikes can pay the extra money while other people who don’t use the bikes don’t have to pay extra. I think that this project is something that many people would be interested in. I definitely think that you can get creative with it so it can accommodate the students as well as the university.
Concept
What would your angle be in promoting this? If you want to appeal to UMaine, you probably need to stroke their ego as well as show them that it’ll make them money somehow. If you could somehow get some rich alumni who’s a biking fanatic to invest in it, that might work, too. I’m sure students would be interested, but I’d worry about people vandalizing them while they’re in the dock.
Technical
In terms of the tech and cost, would you be implementing an entirely new system to replace the Blue Bikes, or creating stations for students to dock a Blue Bike? If you’re creating an entirely new system and buying new bikes, that’s a boatload of money that UMaine will probably not be interested in spending. If there was a way to add the functionality of the Citi Bikes to our current Blue Bikes at a lower cost for buying ones that fix with our docking station, that might work. You also have to factor in that the bikes (if they’re new) will probably have to be stored inside during the winter– so you’ll need a storage space for however bikes there are. Also, leaving the bikes out in the sun and rain degrades the rubber and plastic parts of them over time, so there has to be a replacement budget built into the plan.
Audience
Personally, I’d be much more likely to take a bike off a rack and ride it across campus and drop it off rather than worrying about having to lock my bike and take my nice seat with me all the time. A “beater” bike is great for students, but I think the faculty might even be more inclined to use them rather than ride around campus if the bikes looked nice and functioned well.
Concept:
I think this is a really cool idea. I like how you took something that was already made and decided to bring it here on our campus and make little changes to it.
Design:
Your design gives us a good idea about what it is. I have never heard of these before, but your presentations and the visuals you are providing it gives me a better understanding about how it works.
Technical:
I am interested on how the technical part of this project is going to come all together.
Audience:
The audience for this project would mostly be college students. This would be very helpful for everyone around campus to get places easier and to not have as many vehicles on the road.
Creativity:
I think this is a very creative idea. I think this would become bigger on other campuses too. It is something that is positive to our environment and positive to us as students as well.