Yet Another Bicycle Article? Not so

November 6, 2009 by Sal Atticum

So whatever happened to the UND "Green Bike" Project? We heard in the DS last spring that the program was going to return, but to no avail. I even spoke to someone this fall who claimed they were on the organizing committee and that the next phase was right around the corner. Well, it's November now.

I was never quite sure about the "green bikes" idea, but I can't say I was a vehement critic either. The Environmental Action Organization at my undergraduate institution tried the same thing, with much the same result (instead of the bicycles ending up in the coulee, they ended up as "Frankenbikes"). I'm one of those dreamers of whom people like to make fun, because I want to believe something like this will work, just like I want to believe people will begin to use better grammar, but I'm beginning to see something else: free bicycles (of any color) won't work on this campus because they are a solution to the wrong problem.

The problem at UND is not lack of alternative transportation such as bicycles. There are several hundred (thousand?) bicycles locked up outside of dorms all over campus, not to mention even more slyly hidden in the bushes outside of off-campus apartments. Students and professors are not avoiding riding because they don't have bicycles: they're avoiding it for some other reason. More simply: the problem isn't giving people the ability to ride, it's getting them to ride at all.

Although one could argue that apathy toward freely available alternative forms of transportation is justified in a place with such depressing weather patterns during the school year, I'd suggest that such apathy is an extension of the mindset of college students in general. Rather than "Explore, invent, experiment!" the mantra of choice seems to be "Why do something if you don't have to?"

Nowhere is this clearer to me than in student organizations at UND. Other organization leaders know that most of the time, asking members to show up for meetings and events without offering free food is a lost cause. Getting new members is a different story-and something that I've seldom seen successfully done outside of the (heavily funded) Greek system.

Sure, most organizations will pull in a few new members a year, and sometimes those members will even be somewhat useful in accomplishing the goals of the organization, but how many of us have seen people who truly believe that "90 percent of life is just showing up"?

I could rant, but just as putting more bicycles on campus doesn't solve the problem of people not wanting to ride bicycles, ranting against people who are apathetic doesn't solve the problem of apathy. I'll try to be sweeter and more personable, but I'm still hoping that some of the more successful organizations on campus will drop some hints to the rest of us who have too many grand ideas and too few members to carry them out.

I'm always excited when I hear about organizations in which everyone gets to participate and everyone has a job to do and everyone gets to hang out and have fun with the rewards. I'm excited when that happens (oh so rarely) in one of the organizations I'm a member of. These things get me pumped up because I don't think of myself as a natural leader (I don't really think I ought to be in charge of making final decisions, but it happens anyway and things seem to turn out in the end).

Because of this, I like to get everyone involved, often to their own chagrin at being singled out for a "job." The thing is this: if you're in the group, you're volunteering to contribute.

Getting new members for your club? Fixing student apathy? I have no master-plan solutions. If you're a student organization leader, however, start holding your members accountable to their membership and we may end up with more people who care. Some of them may even ride their bicycles to the meetings.

This article originally appeared in the November 6th issue of the Dakota Student. It is reposted here by the author.

Tags: green bikes, involvement, organizations, students, UND