You may have seen the new bike rental stations on campus or around town. These are set up for people who want to get around the community. This is to help get cars off the road and help the economy.
The program is flexible so people can just rent a bike from any station and return it to any other of its stations. The idea is so that if someone wants to check a bike out at the train station to go to school, then they can just rent one for a small fee and drop it off at the station closet to their school campus.
This program should be taken advantage of. It is going to be helpful for our environment and help with cutting down the traffic in parking lots and streets.
Orange County Transportation Authority chose Bike Nation, the company that has launched a bike sharing program in Anaheim already, to install 15 bike stations and 165 bicycles in Fullerton. This includes the Fullerton Transportation Center, Cal State University Fullerton, Hope International, Fullerton College and Downtown Fullerton. This makes it easy for people to be able to return the bike to any station after they have finished with their errands.
The bike station located on the FC campus is by the parking structure. This way students can park there car to go to class and go do all their errands down town if they need to. This would be an ideal thing to do to save on gas and it would help the bike sharing station so that they see the program being used.
Each bike comes with a basket on the front of to help carry items like groceries, books and whatever else a person needs to carry. So if you need to go get something nearby, save gas and bus fare by taking a bike.
Users only have to unlock the bike with a membership card. People can also ride the bikes free for 30 minutes and for a fee of $2 to $5 for time used afterward. A one day pass costs $5 and a seven day pass costs $12. Annual membership passes are $75 and for students the annual pass is $45. This fee is better then spending an average of $50 a week on gas.
In Washington D.C., where the bike sharing system first started, about 1,600 people joined SmartBike D.C. during its two years of operation, according to Alejandra Molina, a reporter at the Orange County Register. Since the system began in D.C., a system in Arlington County and Alexandria have also started to expand D.C.’s stations, giving them about 175 stations and 1,670 bikes.
The system in Fullerton has the potential to do the same. Bike Nation hopes to expand the program to Orange County and Garden Grove as soon as they can to increase the number of bikes to help the community get to where they need to go and do what you need to get done.
If students all took a bike then it would cut down air pollution and help the environment. This would also cut down on the price you pay for gas, bus fare and other travel expenses. This should change the community for the better.
