Bikeshare at UP Diliman: A glimpse of sustainable transportation for metropolitan areas
Miguel Laperal was a freshman engineering scholar at the University of the Philippines Diliman in 2015 when he read through about bikesharing in the library. The idea of pooling bicycles for the use of numerous end users caught his extravagant.
He imagined this system could function in the university. He pitched the plan to some of his friends, and which is how UP Bike Share was born. Laperal and his workforce have damaged new floor and proven how useful two-wheeled journey can be in the nation.
Bikesharing is not a new idea. A group in Amsterdam, now recognised as a person of the very best metropolitan areas to cycle, commenced the initial generation of bikesharing in 1965 with the Witte Fietsen, or White Bikes, which ended up placed in public parts for anybody to use. The system had many flaws, this sort of as stability and theft, but it paved the way for the plan of sharing bicycles with community associates who needed to get to places.
The principle of bikesharing then picked up 30 a long time later in 1995 as Copenhagen launched its very first coin-operated bikesharing program referred to as City Bikes. For the earlier 24 yrs, bikesharing strategies in towns all around the entire world started off turning into common in Europe and the US. As of 2016, an approximated 2.3 million bicycle units had been lively in just bikesharing techniques on your own, with China top in recent many years.
Bikesharing has also turn out to be well-known on university campuses. Universities these types of as Princeton, Purdue, Penn Condition, and Dartmouth have tailored bikesharing techniques inside their campuses. In the Philippines, the UP Diliman campus remains the only university with a functioning bikesharing process in the region.
UP Bikeshare via official Fb

Yet the commencing of UP Bicycle Share was not so glamorous. Laperal’s crew required to get in touch with on other college students and supporters to support increase revenue to obtain the initial fleet. They worked out how they could use a uncomplicated process with quantity locks and just a couple of stations at the time.
In a number of months, the ragtag team of pupils introduced 10 bikes with a restricted range of end users, mostly dorm citizens, and figured out the upcoming steps. 3 items produced the complete system perform: the boundaries were outlined within the university there have been clear and simple ways on how to use the bikes and there was a perception of community amongst the riders to safeguard the proper use of the shared bikes.
The group before long grew into an firm built up of students from diverse fields—engineering, fantastic arts, science, interaction, and enterprise administration, just to name a handful of. As the operations of the system had been currently being refined, UP Bike Share became a lot more than just the technique. It also turned the greatest situation for sustainable transportation and sustainable towns.
A scholar-led initiative, the campus bikeshare grew from acquiring 10 bikes on provide to 100 units in a few yrs.

The pupil-led firm grew from providing 10 bikes to 100 bikes in three several years, with a peak of 200 riders in 2016. Despite the fact that the present method is not adequate to provide the requires of extra than 24,000 pupils, faculty and staff members users in just the 493-hectare campus, UP Bike Share has been performing toward marketing cycling culture in the university by its various strategies to endorse biking even exterior the university. The team arranged Shifting Gears: Sustainable Solutions Truthful 2020 very last January and Sabay Lakbay, an eco-tour on bicycles around Quezon Town.
The team’s tough perform resulted in a ?15-million grant from the Office of Science and Technological innovation for UP Bike Share to produce its total program in 2016. The present program in put is deemed to be a initially-generation semi-community bicycle sharing plan for college students. The grant awarded to UP Bike Share experienced the likely to grow into a much more superior local program that institutions and LGUs can carry out in their personal localities.
When the pandemic hit, students had been no for a longer period physically attending courses. This led to the non permanent closure of the bikesharing system. Despite this hurdle, UP Bicycle Share was able to lend the fleet of bicycles to medical center frontliners so that these necessary workers could bicycle to and from function. Amid this well being crisis, UP Bike Share proceeds to spread the message of the ability of a bicycle to get people to areas.
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Keisha Mayuga is a transport practitioner and city cyclist working in the direction of better and safer cycling infrastructure in the region. She is the founder of Existence Cycles PH, an initiative that served practically 1,500 frontliners get to do the job with bicycles all through the pandemic.
