By Emily Smith, Daily Emerald Online
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Oregon Campus Compact, composed of presidents from universities and colleges around the state, will recognize Briana Orr, an environmental studies and planning, public policy and management major with the 2009 Faith Gabelnick Student Leadership Award at the Oregon Civic Engagement Awards next week in Portland. Nominated by University sustainability director Steve Mital, Orr coordinates the Outdoor Program's Bike Loan Program that began in the fall.
ODE: How did the program get started, and how has it evolved?
Orr: We just launched the program in fall, and all of last summer was preparing for the program and putting down the structure for the entire program. Since summer, it's been kind of a constant learning from mistakes that we've made and improving what we're doing to serve students better. The basics of the Bike Loan Program is that we are providing students with bicycles for loan and also educational resources and information on bicycling in the area as kind of a holistic picture.
Right now, we have about 65 to 70 bikes out to students and by next December, we're hoping for about 100. Our goal was to put out 20 bikes and we've put out 70. It's more than I envisioned, for sure.
ODE: Where do the bikes come from?
The bikes come from the Department of Public Safety. They impound bikes that are abandoned on campus or they also get bikes that have been reported stolen and no one comes to claim them. Literally for the past couple of years, they have just been keeping them in storage. When we contacted them last summer, we heard numbers of 300 or 400 bikes. We were able to look through them and find the ones that were easy to work on, and we took those ones out of the piles and started getting them out to students. We'll probably get 15 or 20 more over the summer, but the real limiting factor is that we don't have the space for the bikes. We have a couple of storage facilities that DPS has given us, but we really need a better site to crank out more bikes. If the campus wanted to see a full-scale program, then they would need to put resources into that to support it.
ODE: How does the program work?
Orr: A student can check out a bike for a term, but students can keep it for the entire year if they want. They just pay a $65 deposit and with that they get a lock, a light, front and rear lights, fenders, basket and everything a student needs to ride around comfortably in Eugene's weather. The idea with that is that by making this a communal resource, we can just reuse it instead of having students needing to find some way to sell it or eventually throw it away when they don't need to use it. When they bring the bike back at the end of the term, they get their $65 deposit back, so essentially it's free.
ODE: What environmental impact has the program had?
Orr: Essentially, having 70 students that don't need to rely on a car or even rely on LTD to get to campus or wherever they need to get in the community, that's a fairly substantial impact when you're accruing it over the year. I'd also say that even if these students were buying their own bikes and riding them, simply because we are reusing these bikes and reusing resources and keeping the bikes out of the landfill, that also helps create the sustainability loop of reusing things instead of buying things and consuming more. Being able to provide options to students and staff and faculty really opens minds, opens doors to where we can go next, and instead of planning for building more parking lots when we feel like there aren't any alternatives, this is really providing an alternative and saying, 'Hey, we don't need more parking lots ... because look at what we can do, we can give them something else.' Even though it's small right now, it's going to have a really big impact in the future.
ODE: What does this award recognition mean to you?
Orr: It is recognizing the accomplishment, but I see it as - the simple fact that I was nominated and awarded - as more substantial to the shifting values in our culture, and I don't think that 10 years ago even that a bicycling advocate would be on the list. The fact that the Oregon Campus Compact is focusing on sustainability for this civic engagement award is really telling of what we are starting to value and for what we want to see in our generation and in the following generations. Maybe it's not so important that I, specifically, received it, but that they are starting to recognize it.
ODE: How did the program get started, and how has it evolved?
Orr: We just launched the program in fall, and all of last summer was preparing for the program and putting down the structure for the entire program. Since summer, it's been kind of a constant learning from mistakes that we've made and improving what we're doing to serve students better. The basics of the Bike Loan Program is that we are providing students with bicycles for loan and also educational resources and information on bicycling in the area as kind of a holistic picture.
Right now, we have about 65 to 70 bikes out to students and by next December, we're hoping for about 100. Our goal was to put out 20 bikes and we've put out 70. It's more than I envisioned, for sure.
ODE: Where do the bikes come from?
The bikes come from the Department of Public Safety. They impound bikes that are abandoned on campus or they also get bikes that have been reported stolen and no one comes to claim them. Literally for the past couple of years, they have just been keeping them in storage. When we contacted them last summer, we heard numbers of 300 or 400 bikes. We were able to look through them and find the ones that were easy to work on, and we took those ones out of the piles and started getting them out to students. We'll probably get 15 or 20 more over the summer, but the real limiting factor is that we don't have the space for the bikes. We have a couple of storage facilities that DPS has given us, but we really need a better site to crank out more bikes. If the campus wanted to see a full-scale program, then they would need to put resources into that to support it.
ODE: How does the program work?
Orr: A student can check out a bike for a term, but students can keep it for the entire year if they want. They just pay a $65 deposit and with that they get a lock, a light, front and rear lights, fenders, basket and everything a student needs to ride around comfortably in Eugene's weather. The idea with that is that by making this a communal resource, we can just reuse it instead of having students needing to find some way to sell it or eventually throw it away when they don't need to use it. When they bring the bike back at the end of the term, they get their $65 deposit back, so essentially it's free.
ODE: What environmental impact has the program had?
Orr: Essentially, having 70 students that don't need to rely on a car or even rely on LTD to get to campus or wherever they need to get in the community, that's a fairly substantial impact when you're accruing it over the year. I'd also say that even if these students were buying their own bikes and riding them, simply because we are reusing these bikes and reusing resources and keeping the bikes out of the landfill, that also helps create the sustainability loop of reusing things instead of buying things and consuming more. Being able to provide options to students and staff and faculty really opens minds, opens doors to where we can go next, and instead of planning for building more parking lots when we feel like there aren't any alternatives, this is really providing an alternative and saying, 'Hey, we don't need more parking lots ... because look at what we can do, we can give them something else.' Even though it's small right now, it's going to have a really big impact in the future.
ODE: What does this award recognition mean to you?
Orr: It is recognizing the accomplishment, but I see it as - the simple fact that I was nominated and awarded - as more substantial to the shifting values in our culture, and I don't think that 10 years ago even that a bicycling advocate would be on the list. The fact that the Oregon Campus Compact is focusing on sustainability for this civic engagement award is really telling of what we are starting to value and for what we want to see in our generation and in the following generations. Maybe it's not so important that I, specifically, received it, but that they are starting to recognize it.
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