Presidential Perspectives

This week, we’re proud to announce one of our largest initiatives: starting a campus recreational program. The Public Rec Program Pilot Study kicks off in March and will provide a fleet of bicycles and 10 equipment boxes for students, staff, and faculty to use.

Bike Fleet
Through a partnership with Iron City Bikes, we’ll provide a fleet of 45 bikes for people to use whenever they’d like. The bikes won’t be locked up, won’t have limited periods of use, and won’t be restricted to certain areas of campus. The bikes will be large, ’50s cruiser-style bikes. They’ll be single speed and come with a double-rear basket and a bell. These bikes will be publicly available for your use, whether you want to ride them home, to the grocery store, or around Schenley.

Equipment Boxes
These activity boxes will be located at 10 different sectors around campus and will contain footballs, soccer balls, cricket bats, wiffle balls, plastic bats, and Frisbees. The boxes won’t be locked up and you won’t have to check stuff out. There will be an entire box of recreational equipment at your disposal.

How does it work?
Both of these programs will rely heavily on two concepts: the honor system and community policing. Because the equipment isn’t locked up, we can save thousands of dollars on security costs and money can instead be spent on replenishing and replacing equipment. The program’s bikes and equipment will all be painted to look like a Tartan cookie, more or less. The program’s uniformly painted equiptment will bolster school pride, improve the program’s visibility, and brand the equipment so that it will be easily identifiable and therefore less likely to be stolen.

So if you see a bike in someone’s garage or a soccer ball in someone’s room, you’ll know where it came from and it will be your duty to tell them to put it back. We’re making the goods publicly available and it’s up to you to make sure they’re left in good condition and easily available for the next person to use. The program will succeed as long as students support it, look out for it, and help police it.

This will make our campus community more lively, more mobile, and more enjoyable — let’s all work together to make sure that vision is accomplished. If you have any comments, questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to email us sbp@.