Until two years ago, the University’s bicycle program, Bike Ole Miss, consisted of around 20 found and donated bikes the Office of Sustainability rented to students and employees. Bicycle registration did not exist, and the program had grown little in its eight years of existence.
Today, the program includes the Ole Miss Bike Shop, located across the street from the Turner Center in the Kennon Observatory loop, and offers many different rental and repair services.
The program rents out a fleet of over 150 bikes every semester. Of those, 75 are official Ole Miss seven-speed cruisers, recognizable by their relaxed style featuring navy blue paint and Ole Miss logos. The cruisers are the product of a RebelWell grant from Blue Cross Blue Shield and are available for student, faculty and staff use.
The cruisers are a testament to the rapid growth of Ole Miss’s bike program in the last three years, but they are only a fraction of the services the shop provides to the UM campus.
Senior psychology major Victoria Demetropoulos went to the shop last week seeking a bike and was told more bikes would be available next week.
“It seems like a lot of people want to ride bikes this year because it’s easier to get around campus, and you don’t have to worry about parking,” Demetropoulos said.
UM bike mechanic Steve Valliant said the core of the Rebel Pedals rental program’s bike fleet is made up of lost, abandoned, or donated bikes repaired in the shop itself.
If a bike is left on campus, the Department of Parking and Transportation first checks for its registration to a student, staff or faculty member. A registered bicycle can be returned to its owner with a simple phone call. Unregistered bikes are kept in the bike shop where they wait for a three-month grace period during which they can be reclaimed by showing proof of ownership. If the bike remains in the shop at the end of that period, it is cleaned, repaired and offered for rental.
The unconventional method by which Rebel Pedals obtains its bikes makes the number of available bikes for a given semester difficult to gauge in advance. Valliant said the state in which Parking and Transportation finds some bikes adds to the unpredictable nature of the supply.
“The bikes we find around campus are the kinds of bikes that can be abandoned: cheap department store models that break and rust easily,” Valiant said. “If they aren’t fixed right they become crash machines.”
The 114 repaired Rebel Pedals bikes for the fall 2015 semester were rented out in a span of about four days and the bikes still under repair will be available to renters as repairs are made over the course of the semester.
In past semesters, customers have reserved the entire program stock within the first two weeks of class. The shop has a waiting list, made up mostly of international students without access to cars, hoping to rent out one of the remaining bicycles.
Valliant said the shop is hopeful that several outstanding summer rentals will be returned or found in the next few weeks so that they can be made available to the growing wait list.
