Editorial: How you like them bikes?

UNC debuted a bike share Oct. 24, shifting up its commitment to its students and the state. The program has the potential to make a durable improvement to quality of life for those who live or work in the area and beyond — as long as the University can steer it away from a few potholes. 

Tar Heel Bikes, as the program is called, is easy to use. Anyone can rent a bike after downloading the Social Bicycles mobile application and entering payment information. 

For the basic plan, the latter is only needed if one exceeds the hour per day riding time limit. 

In one board member’s experience, an hour was plenty of time for a day’s worth of quick trips around campus (since the clock stops once a bike is locked up at an official hub). 

As for the bikes, they aren’t built for breaking records. Nevertheless, they’re sufficient for their role: they each have three gears, feel sturdy and are easy to check-in and out of hubs. 

All that should be good news for bike culture at UNC and in the rest of North Carolina. 

Theoretically, many of the UNC students who grow accustomed to biking because of the bike share will bring that beneficial habit with them when they go back home or move on post-graduation. 

Of course, Tar Heel Bikes needs to thrive for it to make a cultural mark. If Duke’s experience with bike sharing can be generalized to UNC, it may not.

The Blue Devils launched a bike share in September 2014, only to have their student government withdraw its portion of the program’s funding earlier this year.  

One potential threat to UNC’s program, inequitable hub and bike distribution, is already apparent after a week of live bike-sharing. As of the afternoon of Nov. 2, there were 19 hubs in the program: 18 on campus and one in Carrboro. The bulk of these hubs are aligned around a generally north-south axis. 

In combination with the sloping topography of campus, this means that the natural flow of bikes is toward Hinton James. As of 4 p.m. on Nov. 2, we counted 75 bikes on the UNC program’s Social Bicycling application live-tracking map. Sixty-five were south of the Belltower, leaving four empty hubs north of South Road. 

It also means traveling in an east or west direction with Tar Heel Bikes isn’t practical unless one is going almost all the way to Weaver Street Market in Carrboro. The hubs and bikes need to be spread more widely for the program to do well.

These caveats aside, we applaud the University for this pedal stroke down a pro-bicycling road. Hopefully, it will be the beginning of a long — and not too bumpy — ride.