Campus wide email sent from fscustomerrelations@illinois.edu informing students and faculty about Bike to Work Day, Light the Night, and how to reclaim an impounded bike. The official online email can be found here.
Campus wide email was sent out on how to reclaim someone's impounded bike. Students and faculty who have left their bikes on campus bike racks over the summer have the oppportunity to retrieve their impounded bikes by September 30. The official online email can be found here.
Bicycles marked as abandoned have been collected and stored and as of this morning, July 23, 2024, and have additionally been inventoried and are ready for the next step in the University's yearly Collection and Donation of Abandoned Bicycles Project.
As of Thursday June 20th, the remaining abandoned bicycles on campus have been identified and are prepared to be collected by the Parking Department.
All, Apologies for the delay. Pretty uneventful week. I was out at a conference on Thursday and Friday. My staff handled shop hours on Friday without issue. Made some more headway in the abandoned bike pile but also got half dozen or so direct donations as well. So, we’ve got our work cut out for us this week in processing all those.
Last week, interns Myra Stevens and Sepideh Azizi completed the tagging portion of the Collection of Abandoned Bicycles project. The tagging process was completed by Friday, May 31st. Across campus, approximately 908 bicycles were tagged. After June 15th, the collection of bicycles still left tagged will begin.
All, Shortened week with Memorial Day. Otherwise, business as usual. Subpar donations are still trickling in, so we’re able to continue to pass those along to Habitat. Took a week break on the barn bikes but will be ramping that back up this week. I believe the tagging of abandoned bikes on campus has begun, so we’ll likely get calls/emails about that in the coming weeks.
The numbers:
Visitors: 28
Sales: $656
Memberships: 2 for $60
Bikes (refurb): 2 for $365
Bikes (B-a-B): 1 for $60
Tires/tubes: 5 for $55
Thanks!
All, Last week, with the Bike Project, we were able to donate 20 or so bikes to a nonprofit church group that will send the bikes overseas. These were all bikes that would’ve otherwise been in the scrap yard, so it’s less work for us and helps keep more bikes out of the waste stream—a win-win! We continue to donate kids bikes to Habitat for Humanity as we do not have the storage space to keep those until our winter giveaway.
Got a couple more new hires on board and learning the ropes.
All, Slow beginning to the week and a furious finish. Friday was busier than we’ve been in weeks, but we were also down some folks as finals were wrapped up for most people. Made progress on the abandoned bike pile. Habitat for Humanity’s bike rodeo has been a godsend, as we’ve been able to unload some kids/teen-sized bikes on to them in good conscience knowing they’ll be going to a similar cause. We’ve donated nearly a dozen bikes from CBC alone and will probably have more. We’ve received 14 direct donations from folks graduating or not using their bike, going back two weeks.
All, Big news of last week is the abandoned bikes. Bike Project folk and I were able to take an inventory of the bikes that are available and given the number of bikes—fewest in my tenure!—we are not partnering with Working Bikes this year. I communicated as much last week and no hard feelings. If anything, they’re happy to hear we have less bike waste—and they would know, they’ve got a 3 story building full of bikes.
This week we have a couple new staff members starting here. We’ll do some off-hours training with them.
Following the deadline day to claim impounded bicycles, Sarthak Prasad reached out to Jake Benjamin, campus bike center coordinator, to inform that these bicycles are now considered donated to the Campus Bike Center and the Bike Project of Urbana-Champaign. See the email below:
Hi Jake,
All, Pretty standard week. Busy with some wait time on stands/repairs most days. Had a Build-a-Bike completed—always a good thing. My team and I did Light the Night on Tuesday at the Ikenberry Quad area. First time in a new location always gets us some looks and questions. Not as busy as we hoped but again, it’s not yet familiar to folks. No word yet on numbers.
We were dangerously overloaded on scrap by Friday, but Todd pick it up over the weekend—always appreciated.
The period to reclaim impounded bicycles from summer 2023 has now passed. We had impounded about 240 bicycles in the summer and we returned 24 bicycles! That is a 10% reclamation rate, as compared to 5% in 2022. This was the least number of abandoned bicycles impounded ever on campus!
All of the unclaimed bicycles are now considered donated. Sarthak Prasad will reach out to Campus Bike Center to let them know that they can start removing these bicycles. Since there are only about 200 unclaimed bicycles, we may not donate them to Working Bikes this year.
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On 08/18/2023, Sarthak and Hrushikesh visited the Round Barns to give out two abandoned bicycles to their respective owners who had registered their bicycles.
Sarthak sent announcements (to Caitlin Kaparaz) to be added to the ISSS newsletter (publishing on August 25):
Two new digital signs were added to campus buildings
All, Slow visitor-wise, but busy otherwise. Moved almost all the bikes out of the round barn, and the very last of them I’ll get this week. Sounds like we’ll have less bikes from the round up than in years’ past, something I am happy for. Hopefully, it means more people are caring about and actually riding their bikes—a guy can dream! Irrespective of the reason, less bikes means less grunt work, and that’s a huge plus in my book.
On 07/25/2023, Sarthak and Hrushikesh had a meeting with the University of Illinois Police Department (UIPD) regarding:
Meeting Notes-
- Explaining how to use Field Maps and its functions to UIPD
- Citation/ Impound Fee for the abandoned bicycles is regulated by the Parking Department.
- Th retrieval process of the abandoned bikes will begin by Mid September.
- During that period non-registered bikes will be enforced to register their bike along with the impound fee.
On 07/19/2023, Sarthak, Nathaniel, Christian and Hrushikesh completed the process of documenting and tracking the Abandoned Bicycles On-Campus located/ stored in the Round Barns facility.
