PCPL joins community bike effort

Tuesday, July 29, 2014

After months of planning, the Putnam County Public Library has officially partnered with DePauw University to bring the university's Community Bike Program to library patrons.

It was decided that the library would begin the program with just three bicycles, which are available for rental for those 18 and older. However, if the program were to do well, PCPL hopes to have more in the future.

Students in the DePauw Management Fellows capstone class developed the Community Bike Program back in September 2012. However, the Office for Sustainability assumed the responsibility for making sure the program was running well and maintaining the quality condition of the bikes.

The program has since been open to both DePauw students and Greencastle residents, but has been struggling to get the community response it was aiming for.

"The program began at DePauw where students and Greencastle residents have access to these bikes for free, but nobody seems to know that," Library Director Grier Carson said.

"All you have to do is drop a credit card and your info and you could have it for however long. We'd love to do that, but we didn't want to get involved in the credit card game. So, we thought let's do it through circulation."

With that goal in mind, library staff got to work setting up its system to allow for the bike checkout with a patron's library card along with some of the details.

"We had a program like this in 2008 where we said it's just going to be free for everybody, no checkout. So, if you see a bike you can take it and ride it," Anthony Baratta of DePauw's Office for Sustainability said. "It was, generally speaking, a disaster because they just got stolen and didn't come back. It was probably a little bit too utopian."

Since the new program launched in 2012, not a single bike has been lost. Students are able to check out bikes with their student identification card and rent the bike for a period of 48 hours before returning it to the Inn at DePauw.

"There's kind of this cool element for why it really fits for the library because a lot of the students use it for just going out in the country and having a fun time and things like that and a lot of them ride out to our campus farm," Baratta explained.

"A lot of our students don't have cars, especially our freshman or international students, they're riding them to Kroger for groceries. There's very much a need. What's cool about the library is that people who may not have a credit card are able to get bikes and it's a very central location."

DePauw will still own the bikes, thus the university will take care of all repairs that may need to be done.

The program itself does not make any profit and its funding comes from advertisements put on the front of the bicycle baskets from local businesses.

"We have a fee schedule if something were to happen and something gets lost," Baratta said. "But, we're not in it to make money or to crack down on people. We really want people using bikes."

Starting with three bright yellow bicycles is just a stepping stone in the Community Bike Program's overall goal of expanding throughout the community.

"We want to expand this program to different areas of the community because People Pathways paid for half of the bikes," Baratta said. "The big reason they really wanted to is because they wanted people using People Pathways and getting around, and despite our best intentions, they're only being used by the students just because it's kind of on DePauw's campus."

Adult cardholders are able to check out one bike at a time for a period of two days. The bikes are not eligible for renewal and are subject to a fine of $3 per day overdue. There is also a fine of $1 per day for overdue bike keys and locks.

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