Recent grad and former bike program participant, Katy Alexander, rides her bike past Memorial Hall. Photo by Emily Mohney
Administration officials blamed lack of funds and student interest for the terminations. Executive Director of Facilities Management Bruce Mather made the announcement in a campus-wide email March 26.
Although senior Maggie Callahan enjoyed the program (“Who doesn’t want a free bike?”) she understands why the school had to shut it down.
“It makes no sense to keep betting on an injured horse,” Callahan said. “Not very many people appreciated the opportunity.”
The bicycle program, which started in August 2009, provided free bikes, helmets, and locks to students, faculty, and staff. In exchange, the recipients pledged to bring no motor vehicles to campus for one academic year.
Exemptions were made from Dec. 1 to Mar. 1, with Campus Security issuing marked-down parking stickers to participants. Facilities Management stored those participants’ bikes during the winter months.
Ultimately, the bike program suffered from enrollment woes.
“This year we had 96 new participants in the program and eight who continued from a prior year,” said senior vice president for Finance and Administration Denise Jones. “We believe there are more participants continuing in the program from prior years who just didn’t sign up again but continued to ride the bicycle to and from campus.”
But recent graduate and Stemple’s Cycle Center employee, Katy Alexander places some of the blame for low participation on a lack of promotion from the school.
“The only way I ever saw it promoted was online,” Alexander said. “Plus, they gave away really nice bikes, but the school didn’t really mention that – those bikes were $400, at least.”
And with a $400+ dollar price tag per bike, financial constraints certainly contributed to the bike program’s cancellation. The annual cost for the bike program has been $75,000.
The Zipcar program also began in Aug. 2009, and aimed to provide rental cars on campus for residential students without a car of their own. Students could rent them at hourly or daily rates, depending on their needs.
Fuel, insurance, and maintenance were included.
“It was a way of greening the campus,” said Jones.
“The Zipcar program was started three years ago in order to give members of the campus community who did not have a car readily available to them, the opportunity to use a vehicle periodically if they need[ed] to get somewhere,” she said.
However, like the bicycle program, not much student interest developed in the Zipcar’s brief existence.
It also cost the college “an annual fee to Zipcar of approximately $37,000 to provide two cars on campus,” according to Mather.
He cited these reasons for the ending of the program.
“The level of usage has remained minimal and in an effort to reduce our overall expenses the college has decided to discontinue the program,” Mather wrote.
Jones emphasized lack of funds as the principal reason for ending both programs.
“At this time we are suspending both programs in order to save the $112,200 in cost. Reducing expenses and increasing revenue are the two ways the college has to correct our current financial situation. Saving $112,200 helps get us there,” she said.
Jones went on to reaffirm the college’s commitment to reducing carbon output.
“We still hold firm to the original values that triggered the program[s] – campus community and a greener environment,” she said.
I, personally, am upset and bewildered as to how the campus can eliminate the only two means of transportation available to it’s students. My daughter is a freshman and an out-of-state student (California) and we only stumbled upon the Zipcar and Bike Programs by searching for alternate means of transportation, buried on your website, for our daughter to get to doctors appointments and job interviews. It was never mentioned to myself of my daughter upon our many visits to your campus prior to and during the registration process. Therefore, the lack of success, in my opinion, was not making these services known to students and their parents. Now, as my daughter looks towards her sophomore year in August, she will not benefit from the bike program, nor have the Zipcar available to use. Now we are having to look at buying her a vehicle for her as the only other option is taking a cab. She is living off campus next year which makes this even more of a hardship and a growing feeling of isolation. With tuition increasing for the 2012-2013 terms, It leaves a bad taste in my mouth that significant negative changes like this are being made only after one year at Elmhurst. Were other options considered for on-campus transportation, like I-GO, similar to Zipcar, which many other Illinois campuses utilize? At a time when other colleges are offering free Apple Mac laptops to their students as an incentive, Elmhurst is taking incentives away. Any chance of offering students a program such as this from Apple? Certainly, at a cost of over $40K/year to attend Elmhurst, some incentives should be offered, especially if you want to entice and encourage out-of-state student diversity. The out-of-state students are your free “walking advertisement” and endorsement of Elmhurst College when they return to their hometowns for the summer. it would be nice to have something to talk about other than cuts in current programs that benefit your college students. I sincerely hope you reconsider your decision to discontinue these programs or, at the very least, replace it with some quality incentive program.
I’m extremely disappointed ZIPCAR was cut. Why not have the big wigs take a pay cut? In “saving money ” a big resource was taken away instead of doing more promotion of the vehicles.