Fifteen years ago, when cycling enthusiast Rosi Kerr ’97 started as director of the College Sustainability Office, she founded Dartmouth Bikes to promote bike culture on campus. Its student-run repair shop on the ground level of Fahey-McLane is packed with bicycle parts. Students who go through its seven- to eight-week bicycle mechanics course in winter term are then employed as interns to handle maintenance and repairs. “We have weekly pop-up bike shops, which we call ‘PUBS,’ doing small fixes, like if a chain needs to be lubed, brakes adjusted,” says Marcus Welker, the Sustainability Office’s assistant director for operations. Abandoned bikes in reasonable condition that are collected around campus can be refurbished and often are offered for free or at a significant discount to students. Other bikes are used for parts or recycled.
Bicycle Jam
“This bike appears to be abandoned. If this bike is in use, please remove this tag and move your bike.” Two to four times a year, Welker and several student interns with Dartmouth Bikes search campus to tag bikes with flat tires or rusted chains that are left locked in one of the College’s 200 or so bike racks.
About 150 to 200 of the few thousand bikes on campus are abandoned each year, particularly at the end of spring term, when most students leave campus for the summer—or for good.
“The bike racks are out of control,” Welker says. When abandoned bikes jam racks, bikes get locked on light poles and handicap railings and ramps. With a map of campus bike racks created by world record-breaking cycling phenom Bond Almand ’26, Welker is identifying choke points—near Sanborn and Collis and behind Berry—and where additional racks are needed. He hopes the new Project 529 system, used globally to register bikes, will help his team find owners and ease the bike rack crunch.
