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If you have been living in a shell the last month or have trouble seeing then you probably didn’t notice the bright orange bikes EVERYWHERE around campus. Spin bikes are spreading across the country, and influencing others to adopt a more sustainable alternative to driving.
“In its first 20 days, SPIN saw 656 unique riders and 4,500 rides more rides at Furman in the first week than did Seattle, Spin’s inaugural launch site” (1).What is all the hype around spin bikes? I mean bikes have been around for hundreds of years; the earliest bicycle being a wooden scooter-like contraption called a celerifere, invented around 1790 by a guy named Comte Mede de Sivrac. What’s so cool about spin bikes is that they are one of the first dockless bike sharing programs to launch across the U.S. with their Spin Cities Project launching first in Seattle.
A lot of my friends (and maybe sometimes me too) drive to class when we are running late in the morning or just around campus on a busy day. It only takes at most about 15 minutes to walk to any place on campus; although some of us like to convince ourselves that we don’t have 15 minutes in our busy day to spare. Then why not use our own bikes that a good percentage of our students have here on campus? It’s all about convenience, sometimes I don’t want to have to worry about riding my bike everywhere around campus during a school day and having to worry about locking it up every time and weaving in and out between the busy students waking between the academic buildings; sometimes Isimply prefer talking and walking besides classmates as well. Spin has no obligations, you can leave it anywhere and you can lock it with a click of a button
I use Spin bike almost 4 days aweek and it has become such a great way to get around campus. I have stopped driving my car around campus and I am rarely late to class anymore. My boyfriend and I can finally go on bikes rides together and take quick trips down trough the Swamp Rabbit Trail to have lunch in Travelers Rest. Majority of students don’t use their cars further than 5-10 miles from campus so Spin bikes are great for eliminating unnecessary car usage within short d
istances, limiting the pollution in cities and campuses. Let me just say, I am a fan of Spin bikes and would recommend them to other students and other campuses to give them a try for their superb ease of use.
– Natalia Baldwin
References
- https://news.furman.edu/2017/11/02/furman-taking-dockless-bike-share-program-for-a-spin/
- https://seattle.curbed.com/2017/7/17/15980792/spin-orange-bike-share-launch
- https://www.spincities.org