Bison Bikes Come to Paris [Justin]
When I was in college, the student body leadership started a bike-sharing program to let people without their own bikes get to class faster. They were called ‘Bison Bikes’ after our school mascot, and painted in gold and black, the school colors.
Back then, the motive was to reduce driving from class to class and mitigate parking and traffic issues. Today, we’re more concerned about the environmental impact of too much driving.
Paris has started a bike-sharing program similar to Harding’s. The 10,000 bikes the’ve made available are being used around six times a day, for over a million trips so far.
The Bison Bikes were all stolen or destroyed within a month. After that, they became something of a campus joke. Let’s hope the Paris program(me) is more sustainable.
Of course, Paris has trains and a subway. T’would be nice.
My roommate was in charge of the Bison bikes… LOL I forgot all about those. Boy, what an ideal venture for small town Searcy. too bad it didn’t work out. I wish we had that here in TN.
That must have been after I left. I don’t remember it.
You know, Harding students were so destructive. The chairs in the student center were supposed to be virtually indestructible and came with a lifetime warranty. But somehow Harding students managed to destroy large numbers of them. The chair company had never had a college make use of the warranty the way Harding did. They were genuinely shocked at how many Harding students ruined. It doesn’t surprise me that the bikes didn’t last.
Do you think there was any way of preventing the bike theft? Surely there was a checkout process where a bike was connected to a name. Why was there a problem?
The utility of Bison Bikes lives on. I use the Bison Bike experiment in class every semester to illustrate “collective goods” in IR.
If something belongs to everybody, it usually ends up being the responsibility of nobody.
It’s a great illustration. And I actually rode a Bison bike based on the theory that the experiment would last about a week.
Andy-
There was no checkout system. The bikes were simply left in the bike racks around campus with no locks. I don’t know how many were actually stolen, if any, but there were no working bikes left within a few weeks.
It looks like the Paris system is actually one of cheap rentals (a euro per half-hour), which introduces at least a little accountability and generates funds for repairs.
Funny thing from the story: people are riding the bikes downhill, then taking public transit uphill, so there’s a glut of bikes in low-lying areas.
[...] Radical Congruency - Bison Bikes Come to Paris. [...]
[...] August 17, 2007 It seems that too few Parisians went to Harding University. [...]
Public use bikes stolen at a Christian university. Makes one tearful with pride, doesn’t it?
the small city of Bloomington, IN did a very similar thing to Bison Bikes in ‘97. Lousy bikes to begin with, no accountability, no cost, and quickly destroyed. I don’t think that many bikes were actually stolen (they were painted bright yellow, after all) but I saw a lot of them being used for things that bikes were not meant to be used for. (i’ll leave exactly what to your imagination) . . .