Bikes in Campus
How $200/student can speed up travel time by 200% and prevent lateness, but is it feasible?
Imagine yourself in a campus, it’s 9.45 and class has just been dismissed. You glance at the schedule and spot the next class at 10.00, relax, you’ve got 10 minutes, right? Well you are, if you’re class is next door or a few buildings away, if its on the other side of campus however, that is a whole different story. This is one of the negatives of a moving class, especially when its schedule is not well thought out, sending you zipping around campus all day. By the time you get home, your smartphone’s step counter would’ve likely hit the 20k mark, congratulations, you’ve just finished a quarter marathon.
Admit it, walking long distances repeatedly, sucks, period. It sucks even more when you’re on a time constraint. That is why Karl Von Drais invented the bicycle, he simply wanted to get from point A to point B faster without much hassle. Whats that? there are other ‘fast’ ways to transport people you say? well that’s actually true, there are a lot ways, buses, trains, and cars can indeed transport people fast, without causing undue fatigue to the passengers too. But alas they suffer from certain drawbacks related to motorized vehicle use, such as pollution, lack of parking space, expensive running cost, or for public transports, poor timing and low quality vehicles/drivers.
Besides all those inherent drawbacks, there is also another problem, in campus vehicle bans. Bandung Institute of Technology in Indonesia is one of those universities that apply it (even though it is for the students only), thus people are forced to walk in the campus areas. This policy certainly causes a lot of positive benefits, such as increasing physical activity by promoting walking, reducing air pollution, and giving people time to relax and socialize when they walk. But no matter how benevolent this policy seems, it still has one glaring drawback, increased travel time.
Bandung Institute of Technology has a decently big campus, getting from one end to the other can take as long as 9-12 minutes depending on your walking stride. It’s not a huge problem when we get classes that are grouped together in a cluster of buildings, but more often than not, we don’t. Oftentimes classes are held in either in the east or west GKU (General lecture building), and if you look at the map below, it is located as far apart from each other as possible, convenient right?
According to my experiment, using a bicycle is a lot faster compared to walking on foot, in the most extreme cases where the distance is the farthest, using a bicycle cuts the travel time by over 200%. But not all areas can be accessed faster by bike, several technical laboratory buildings (Labtek) that are located near plaza widya are more accessible on foot compared to using a bicycle, this is due to the distribution of bike shelters.
If you look at the table above you would realize that the average travel time on foot is a little over 5 minutes, and on the most important route, that is the one between the two GKU’s, it is only around 4 and a half minutes. Based on the data above, travel time wouldn’t be a problem because most schedules give 10–15 minute pause between each class for moving purposes, but this line of thinking is missing the point. It is a lot better if you have the option to travel faster compared to having no option at all, because sometimes there are force majeure, such as professors demanding extra time to cover a difficult topic, being physically weak and exhausted due to excessive cramming, or even running out of time due to the long queue in the cafeteria, there is always a reason to get somewhere faster.
Sometimes in a normally 5 minute commute from class to class, a 2–3 minute difference is all that stands between spending the next 2 hours outside pondering if you could’ve ran faster, or being inside and taking notes for the upcoming tests.
Luckily Bandung Institute of Technology seems to have already gotten the right idea and supplied us with campus bikes that are both convenient and practical to use. They are spread over the bike shelters so that they can service the broadest audience, and increase the mobility of students, sounds good right? Yeah, too good.
What was supposed to be a revolution in how people can travel around campus became a money sink. Every year the campus has to spend a lot of money to either repair the bikes, or replace them altogether. This is not due to the inherent poor quality of the bikes themselves, but rather because of bad usage habits by the users. Many were parked not in the designated shelters, but in the sides of secretariats, or in car parks, some are even left in grass fields or bushes, all in the name of accessibility, but one might wonder, what’s accessible to the perpetrator, might just make the bikes less accessible to the rest of the campus masses. This parking habit exposes the bikes to frequent rains, and wear and tear, which will inevitably corrode their frames. It doesn’t take much time to turn a new bike into garbage if it’s left unsheltered, especially with Bandung’s high humidity and frequent wet-hot cycles.
The erratic parking behavior also makes it hard for security personnel to guard the bikes against potential thefts, which are sadly quite common in Indonesia, especially Bandung, with its huge bike communities and thriving bicycle market. Bike service crews are also burdened by this behavior, they can no longer go to a shelter and simply collect the bikes for monthly maintenance, now they have to count how many bikes are missing and enlist the help of security and other campus elements to scour the campus in hopes of finding those missing bikes. Its common to find bikes in secretariats, under trees, or even left rotting in some corner of the campus, but not all are that lucky, sometimes thieves get there first, and if its unguarded and unlocked, they’ll steal it in the cover of night. All of this adds to the running cost of issuing and maintaining a campus bike scheme.
This results in the frequent locking of campus bikes, so much so that no one can use them for most of the time, as the campus fears that the irresponsible nature of the students will damage the bikes. They are now only usable from about 7am in the morning, until the last class is over, which is around 6pm, but in most cases, even during those supposedly active hours they still get locked up. This policy is a double edged sword for the campus officials, indeed they managed to combat the rampant misuse of campus bikes, and protect their bikes in the process. On the other hand, they also make those same bikes useless at their jobs, that is transporting people from point A to B quickly, it turns them into heaps of iron rotting in the bike shed, useless.
This policy of bike-locking, and restriction of access to campus bicycles does bring a positive benefit though. Now, more than ever, students bring their own bikes to campus. There are many reasons for this, but most would answer that it gives them easier access to, from, and around the campus. With an emphasis on the around campus part, a job that the campus bikes were supposed to do.
The increased number of students that uses a bicycle to travel to campus brings several notable benefits for the general public, such as reduced air pollution, and traffic jams, it also brings benefits to the students themselves, they become fitter, healthier, and more likely to pay attention tho their surroundings due to the slower pace of bicycles compared to motorcycles.
But this surge also has quite a few drawbacks, most of them are felt in the campus area itself. The upsurge in bicycle usage has overwhelmed the limited bike shelters that are formerly designed to accommodate the campus bike system, and the few students that brings their own bicycle. The result? rows of bikes spilling from the designated shelters into other spaces, spaces which other people use too.
The solution for this would be quite easy, build more bike shelters! If only solving problems were that easy though. There are many factors hindering the expansion of bike shelters around the campus, a lack of space, and a high upfront cost would be the most obvious reason as to why Bandung Institute of Technology has restrained itself.
The costs to construct or buy a bike shelter ranges from $300 for small, do it yourself type of shelters, to over $1500 for large shelters that can accommodate around 15–20 bikes, which roughly translates to $100 for one bike parking space added, which is quite a lot. The average cost of bikes in Indonesia would be around $100, even cheaper if buying en masse. From the data above, we can assume that it would cost around roughly $200 to add a single bike with the appropriate shelter space. This doesn’t account for the cheap yet expensive if accumulated cost of repairing and maintaining said bikes. Even if they only build bike shelters and expect the students to bring their own bikes, its still quite expensive to expand and maintain extensive bike shelters, not to mention the need for security guards to prevent theft. Besides all of the above, maybe the campus higher-ups don’t consider bikes all that important, after all, the campus area is only about 286,830m2, so adding a faster method of transportation isn’t that high up on their list.
Its easy to understand why, despite the many benefits offered by having a campus bike system, Bandung Institute of Technology chooses not to expand their system, and instead rely on improving and encouraging other cheaper forms of transportation, such as walking, which is actually the only form of transportation inside the campus that is cheaper than using bikes. At the end of the day, it’s simply that hard to run a successful campus bike system if the human and material resources aren’t up for it, and by the looks of it, we still have a long way to go.
