Putting a Spin on Biking

San Diego, California | March 16, 2018

Dispersed in random pockets of the University of California, San Diego, masses of identical orange bicycles are placed throughout the campus in the last three months. Most of them are grouped together, parked neatly alongside a few personal bikes. Some of them stand on their own next to buildings or in corners outdoors. The rest of them are being used by biking students and faculty.

The rentable SPIN bikes are a recent technological advancement that are shaping the way students get around campus. Predominantly known for their conveniency to students, the SPIN bikes may also be creating a bike culture centered around health and environmentalism.

According to the UCSD Transportation Services Website, “Spin will provide five free rides to all new registered campus users” if they use their UCSD email address to make the account. Every first ride under 30 minutes is $0.50 and each additional half hour is $1.00. However, users can get unlimited rides under 30 minutes for $14 a month, or unlimited rides under 30 minutes for $49 per year.

A successful trial program of 50 bikes implemented in December led to the official SPIN bike program’s official implementation on January 18, 2018 and an additional 250 SPIN bikes on campus were made accessible to users.

Warren College student Sandra Chavez-Martinez has been using them since the new implementation. Sandra would usually walk to her classes during the 2017–2018 school year, but started biking again when the program started. “I missed having a bike and it’s super convenient when you’re going downhill,” she says.

Sandra has been using the bike about once or twice everyday in Winter Quarter. She mostly uses it to get to her morning class from her on-campus living spaces in The Village Apartments, about 0.6 miles to her class in Solis Hall.

Although the costs of the rides are seemingly low, Sandra points out that she only uses the $0.50 fee for ten minutes since she rides it within the campus, meaning that she is paying a 30-minute fee for the ten minutes it is of use to her.

Sydney Hu, another UCSD student who joined the SPIN bike community, also admits that although the bikes are “easily accessible”, they are “expensive for short trips”.

However, the rented bike program appears to be an overall cheaper alternative to the common personal bicycle. “Not only have I lost my [own] bike, but I know a lot of people who have lost their bikes and aren’t willing to spend a lot of money just to risk losing it [again]. [SPIN] offers easy transportation without having to worry about being responsible,” said bike-enthusiast and Revelle student Jane Patel.

Bike rider Sandra Martinez-Chavez also prefers a SPIN bike to a personal bike, as she doesn’t “have to worry about getting it stolen.”

Unlike common bicycles, the SPIN works on an app-based system, in which users are able to scan their smartphones to the QR code in the back of the seat in order to unlock it before riding. Students are advised to then lock the hook back once they are finished riding.

The GPS-installed SPIN bikes are equipped with a tracker. Warren Student Sandra pulls out the app and displays a map of UCSD layered with blue pin points to represent available bikes.

The GPS tracker may be limited for those who live off-campus, as the bikes are meant for short-term rides. On the UCSD SPIN Bikeshare Website, users are advised to not take the bike off-campus and to return it later the same day. “Spin will retrieve all locked bicycles that are ridden off campus. Between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. seven days a week. Spin may be requested to pick up and remove any bicycle(s) from campus and/or other San Diego locations.”

Although this particular SPIN bikeshare program is meant for UCSD students only, programs like this are slowly being incorporated as part of the transportation facilities of other cities like Seattle, Washington, San Francisco and Bellflower, California. In city-like spaces, bikers may have more freedom with the parking of the SPIN bikes, as students at UCSD are advised to park them neatly near bike racks.

Although Sandra believes it would be a great idea for cities to start implementing similar programs, Sydney thinks that “the bikes would be too hazardous” in crowded city spaces.

Professor Keith Pezzoli, the head of the UCSD department of Urban Studies and Planning, believes otherwise and that the SPIN program could be a huge benefit to campuses and cityscapes alike.

“There’s all sort of advantages,” Pezzoli says. “When you put it in a larger context, there’s cost saving to our society for health reasons: less obesity, less cardiovascular disease; and there’s that larger thing of designing our lives to be more active. So this is an element of infrastructure to make being active a little bit easier.”

Environmentalists might also take pride in the bikeshare program and the up-and-coming bike culture. Unlike a car, bicycles do not require fuel so they do not emit carbon dioxide when riding. The manufacture of bicycles also depend on less energy, and less water is used per bicycle.

“Another benefit might be people showing up to classes on time, reducing the stress level, creating a culture of bike-ridership, and possibly [lowering] the economic burden of maintaining a bicycle,” Professor Pezzoli adds.

Professor Pezzoli believes that with the litany of benefits the SPIN-like programs can provide, more students and cities alike will start using them and incorporating them into their transportation facilities system. “When we think about infrastructure for mobility, any effort that we can invest in lowering the difficulty of doing the right thing will change behavior.”