Today, members of the planning team attended the third meeting for Bike Month 2025. The team discussed sponsorships and advertising for Bike to Work Day as well as location and purchasing details for Light the Night. Attached is a document with agenda items and a document with roles & responsibilities.

All,

Pretty slow week, except for the last hour on Friday—fittingly enough. We’re working through scrapping the remaining low-quality bikes that are only good for the occasional component here and there.

We had staff in on Tue/Thurs to help ramp up for sale production and we’ve made some headway there. We’ll continue the trend this week. Total for sale bikes is, I think, 15-20 with more in the queue.

The numbers:

Visitors: 15
Sales: $316
Membership: 1  for $30
Tires/tubes: 14 for $129

Thanks!

Jacob Benjamin
Coordinator -- Campus Bike Center

This morning, Sarthak, Emily, Ricardo, and Max began Phase 3 of the abandoned bicycles project: inventorying the impounded bicycles. Completion of this process is anticipated by 7/30.

Emily is continuing to work on researching bicycle ambassador and bike buddy programs. As of July 18th, the form Emily sent out to various universities, municipalities, and organizations, on June 27th, has received 11 responses. Only 2 responses are from groups with bicycle ambassador programs and 2 from bike buddy programs. On July 17th, Emily interviewed a research specialist at the New Jersey Bike and Pedestrian Resource Center at Rutgers University about their former New Jersey Ambassadors in Motion Program. The call was very informational especially when it came to learning about the biggest successes from the program and the challenges that forced it to disband. Emily and the research specialist also discussed other bike programs and bike infrastructure at the university that were relevant to the New Jersey Ambassadors in Motion Program.  

While the form is open until July 25th, the current information that has been gathered can be useful for understanding potential events, applications, and procedures that students are responsive to in order to implement a bike buddy and bike ambassador program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Attached is a pdf of notes from the call and another pdf of notes from the form.

A survey of the bike repair stations on campus was completed on 7/17/2025. The survey found that several stations had faulty pumps and missing tools, problems which F&S will seek to fix. A PDF of the survey is attached to this project update.

Following are Sarthak Prasad's notes from the introductory meeting on 7/16/2025.

Attended By: Eliana Brown, Layne Knoche, Andrea Wagner, Madelyn Craft, Ashley Belle, Justin Vozzo, Sarthak Prasad, Stirling Lemme

• Introductions happened
• Lumpkin Family Foundation
  
  • Greater C-U project
• Demo area on campus showing benefit of having native plants under established trees especially around ROW
  
  • Carbon sequestration
  • Some additional support of mature trees
• On the ground implementation
• Community Outreach
• Tree Management stepping stone
  
  • Making changes around the south quad area
  • Developing areas - underplanting similar to RORG
  • There is evidence in improving tree health with these plantings
• Even as a small area as a demo area

• What support are you they expecting?
  
  • Similar to RORG
    
    • Ryan and his crew for mulch
    • Support for coordination with the specific trees
    • Coordinating work orders
    • Additioanl treatments to the trees if necessary
    • To establish it - we would need of Ryan's group to kill the grass (herbicide application - maybe 2)
    • Application in August and September (1 month apart)
    • Areas that are not sidewalk bound - F&S uses a edge trencher
  • Check with county master gardener - arborists,
  • Low maintenance plantings
    
    • So that it is easy for implementation
• Providing materials to the people in the community

 Location

 Stay away from the main stretch on the quad

• What is the scale?
  
  • One tree - 200 sq ft garden?
  • South Quad?
• The foundation may be supportive of a larger scale project if there is sufficient/appropriate maintenance support available
  
  • We don’t want a difficult maintenance
  • Smaller spaces preferred
• Kirby Ave - South side strip between First and Oak
  
  • Very high visibility
  • Very high traffic
  • Salt
  • So there may be a chance that this area might fail -
  • Outside of scope - too big of an area
• Different native species around different trees in the same area-
  
  • Several small pockets of areas

• Architecture Building area - opposite to the Main Library - Preferred (First preference)
  
  • Gregory Dr
  • We want to have people from the community to be able to see and access this area - this area is a bit restrictive
• Trees around Krannert Center (Second preference)
  
  • Really great for Community
• West side of Armory
  
  • Construction upcoming - so don’t use this area 

Timeline

• Letter of intent due at the end of this month
• Letter of support
  
  • No need for the location
• Grants start -
  
  • October would be the start planning
    
    • For a year
    • Opportunity for multiple years - if you do a good job
  • We need the location for the application

• Application deadline  - September 5

• When do we plant?
  
  • Planning over the winter -
  • Spring 2026 (May) or Fall 2026 (September) planting
• When do we get the ARC approval?
  
  • August meeting

Funding

• Average grant allocation - $25k and max is $50k.
  
  • Would campus kick in some money?
    
    • SSC money

Maintenance

• MOU

To-do

• Letter of Support - due at the application process

All,

To my mind, a bit of a slow week. Sold some bikes and prepped more for B-a-B/sale bikes.

This week I’ll be bringing staff in extra hours to help build more bikes for the inevitable Beginning Of Semester rush. We’re still hovering around 20 for sale now but are building a good inventory of fully-prepped B-a-Bs for when we sell out of our refurbed bikes. We are paring down our inventory of old/bad wheels that are taking up valuable space and creating safety hazards, which will make way for our more valuable and useful parts/bikes.

The numbers:

Visitors: 16
Sales: $499
Bikes (refurb): 1 for $200
Memberships: 6 for $180

Tires/tubes: 12 for $78

Jacob Benjamin
Coordinator -- Campus Bike Center
 

Today, members of the planning team attended the second meeting for Bike Month 2025. The team discussed branding, sponsorships, and location details for Light the Night. Attached is a pdf with agenda items.

Agenda

• Michael's updates
  • Stripped out HTML from ALL project update teasers (homepage, Project pages, Theme pages, Place pages, Collection pages, Key Objective pages)
  • Added expand/collapse to Recommendations listing on Project pages for listings with 4+ items
    • List w/3 items - no truncation
    • List w/9 items - truncated to 3 items
    • List w/98 items - truncated to 3 items
  • Here are a couple options for differentiating subject lines for iCAP Portal suggestions:
    • Use submission ID, e.g. "iCAP Portal Suggestion (ID #181)" <-- Decided to use ID
    • Use Subject / Project Name field, e.g. "iCAP Portal Suggestion: Campus-wide Solar Panel Installation"

Discussion

• [Quinn] Project pages for directing users to the many available data sources on the iCAP portal (e.g. Public Data for Independent Research)
  • Discussed pros & cons of Basic Page vs. Project vs. another approach
  • This could be part of a larger Getting Started section to provide guidance to new visitors
  • Decided to leave this page as a Project for now; may revisit in the future
• For next meeting:
  • Discuss metric naming convention (see Discussion about Metrics - May 19, 2025)
  • Finalize plans for removing national research programs from Projects listing
  • Discuss 2025 Objectives dashboard (add in September, start displaying in October) - see "Adding Key Objectives" private file under Sustainability iCAP Portal project
  • New iCAP Team (Sustainable Buildings) being formed - discuss what that looks like on the iCAP Portal

TODOs

• ✅ Replace map link on homepage with link to "Resources for Independent Research" or "We've got data!"
• ✅ Update suggestion email subject line
• ✅ Find out if we can add administrative field to mark who responded to a Suggestion

Read the full article on the PR Newswire website

“Today, the Green Sports Alliance proudly announces the release of its latest comprehensive resource: the Strategy Playbook, a groundbreaking guide designed to help sports and entertainment organizations embed sustainability into core business strategy.

“Strategy Playbook offers actionable insights for teams at every level—from collegiate to professional leagues. It includes case studies from Golden State Warriors, Denver Zoo, Hard Rock Stadium, Moody Center, Gillette Stadium, University of Illinois, Penn State University, Cincinnati Zoo, Cincinnati Reds, Florida Panthers, Chicago Cubs, FIFA, Austin FC, Saint Paul Arena Company, Ashton Gate Stadium, University of Wisconsin Stevens Point, and the Minnesota Twins.”

The attached PDF contains performance metrics for Zipcar usage on campus for June 2025.

Eco-Counter data collected for months of March to June of 2025 on July 8, 2025.

This morning, Sarthak, Emily, and Max visited the seven shipping containers to check their progress, attach a padlock to each shipping container door, and put an identifying sticker on each shipping container. Each shipping container now also has electricity and lights installed as well as a sign on the outside, numbering 1-7. Attached are photos of the lights and signs.

June 2025 photos of the Florida Orchard Prairie have been added to the box folder.

RailSplitter Wind Farm provided the June 2025 Buyer's Share amounts by the hour, totaling 1,179.7 Megawatt hours.The June 2025 Buyer's Share Report is attached below.

As of this morning, Emily, Max, and Ricardo have finished Phase 2 of the abandoned bicycles project for 2025, identifying abandoned bicycles. 262 bicycles were identified as abandoned and are prepared to be collected by the parking department. 

Please see attached the general timeline and task reponsibilities for the abandoned bicycles project every summer.

The attached file is a collection of information about thermal energy installations on campus, including solar thermal, geothermal, and biomass. Although it has missing information, it is the start of collecting pertinent information about these systems. 

Today, Sarthak and interns Emily and Max have started identifying abandoned bicycles (bicycles with the orange tag not removed) to prepare for the bicycles eventual collection by the Parking Department. This step of the process is expected to be finished later this week. 

On June 27th, Emily sent out emails to 14 different organizations that have a bike ambassador, a bike buddy, or a similar program to learn more about bike ambassador and bike buddy programs. The email includes a description of the two goals relating to creating bike ambassador and bike buddy programs stated in the 2024 Campus Bicycle Plan. The email also included a 40 question questionnaire, which is linked as a pdf.

These organizations include the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, the public works department in the county where Pennsylvania State University is located, Rutgers University New-Brunswick, University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of California Irvine, University of Iowa, University of California Los Angeles, University of Edinburgh, University of Maryland, University of Oregon, the City of Madison, Wisconsin, Indiana University, and a local biking group in Portland, Oregon (BikeLoud PDX). While 25 universities were researched, not all universities have a bike ambassador program, a bike buddy program, or a similar program and so local organizations that have such programs in these areas were also contacted. Responses are requested from the 14 organizations by July 25th.

On June 30th, Sarthak forwarded the questionnaire to the Campus Bike Programmer Network.