Worcester Business Journal

8 Worcester Business Journal | October 16, 2017 | wbjournal.com After starting small at colleges, bikeshare programs are finding early success in Worcester BY GRANT WELKER Worcester Business Journal News Editor The bicycle economy National bikeshare trips are climbing. Bikeshare programs '10 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 '11 '12 '13 '14 '15 '16 Bikeshare trips (in millions) 28M Source: National Association of City Transportation Officials W orcester likely wouldn't strike any- one as a good city for bicycling. Winters are brutal. Streets are hilly. Unlike Boston or Cambridge, the city has very few bike lanes or paths. Against all that, bicycling as commut- ing is growing fast in Worcester. Ofo, a bikeshare program with 400 bikes, started last month, a few months after a pedicab service called WooRides began. Worcester Polytechnic Institute has found success with its bikeshare program for students and staff, and Clark University and Worcester State University have had smaller programs for several years. Worcester joins the bikeshare world as more than 25 million bikes were used in bikeshare programs last year, five times as much as in 2012, according to the National Association of City Transportation Officials. China-based ofo picked Worcester as only the second American city where it operates, finding that the criteria it looks for – size, layout, population demographics – all made Worcester a good fit, said Grace Lin, the company's vice president for the United States. "It turned out that Worcester and ofo were a mutually good fit," said Lin, whose company uses all lowercase let- ters so that its name looks something like a person hunched over a bike. Starting at the colleges WPI's bikeshare program started last school year as a student's major research project turned reality. Kevin Ackerman, now a graduate student there, looked at other college campuses with bike programs and created a detailed proposal for exactly what a similar one at WPI would look like. Gompei's Gears – named after the school mascot – tallied up 1,400 regis- tered users, representing one-fifth of the WPI campus community, and 7,000 trips last school year. "I don't think we realized how popu- lar this bike program was going to be," said Liz Tomaszewski, the college's associate director of sustainability. Clark's program includes about 10 refurbished bikes kept under a canopy just outside the Higgins University Center. Someone looking to borrow a bike first chooses a bike, goes to the campus information desk, and takes a key to unlock that bike. The program was pitched by stu- dents in a sustainability class, said Ben Gardner, Clark's assistant director of community engagement. Clark stu- dents use the bikes to get off campus, for a grocery run or to make it to work. "It's all about creating that access for students," Gardner said. Worcester State created its own pro- gram modeled in part on Clark's. The school keeps bikes at three small sta- tions. About half the bikes are on long- term loan to international students, said Mark Wagner, the director of the Binienda Center for Civic Engagement. The program has about 150 people signed up, with about 30 repeat users over the course of the school year, Wagner said. Creating a bike-safe Worcester The group WalkBike Worcester has advocated for safer roads, particularly One of 400 bikes brought to Worcester by the Chinese company ofo. Other bikeshare programs have expressed interest in Worcester, too. P H O T O / C O U R T E S Y

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