So where have all the bikes gone?
"I bet the bikes are in the bottom of the Connecticut River," Assembly member Adam Shpeen '07 said. "[The program] was a massive failure and I voted against it."
Todd Rabkin Golden '06, Frank Glaser '08 and Ben Zimmerman '07 started the BGB program and unveiled it in its third incarnation last May, bringing 50 communal black Iron Horse bikes to campus at a cost of $2000 to the Assembly.
The program resolution passed by SA stipulated that students who paid a $10 fee for three terms of membership would be given a skeleton key to the locks on all the bikes.
Neither the original BGB initiative of 2000 nor 2004's small pilot program, Rides Across Dartmouth, included a membership clause, an oversight which resulted in the vandalism and theft of many of the bikes.
The membership stipulation of last year's program did little to reduce vandalism, however, and most of the bikes are thought to be either damaged or missing.
Student Body President Noah Riner '06, who voted against the program, said he thought it was a waste of money.
"As a friend of mine said, it's a Communist dream that just doesn't work in practice," Riner said. "My administration has not continued the bikes program because I believe it is a poor use of students' money."
Golden, however, pointed to the success of similar programs at other colleges like Middlebury, stating that despite his disappointment, he did not believe the project to be a failure.
"It is something that has worked at a lot of colleges and communities across the world, but it would have been great if it had gone better," he said.
Zimmerman, who is also a former sports editor of The Dartmouth, attributed the program's failure to a combination of Assembly indifference, inherent technical problems and the campus' general hostility toward the bikes.
"There is something amazing about that program that turned everyone on everyone," Zimmerman said. "People were physically exhausted after we debated to get [the resolution] passed, and the Assembly wasn't really involved after that point."
He also cited technical problems like the fragility of the handlebars and the difficulty of locking the bikes as obstacles in getting the program off the ground, but said that he was surprised by students' negative reactions to the bikes.
"The main reason it didn't work is that people didn't want to take care of the bikes," Zimmerman said.
"I got a sense of maliciousness, he added. "People were invested in it not working and for some reason were happy when it didn't. Of course it couldn't work if the campus wanted to break the bikes."
Zimmerman also said that people take the program out of context, and pointed out that it only spent $2000 of last year's Assembly's approximately $80,000 budget.
"The Assembly has more money than it knows what to do with," he said. "Consequently, it ends up wasting money on events like Collis-Up-All-Night."
The Assembly allocates money for food and events like Collis-Up-All-Night and the student-faculty brunch simply because the money has nowhere else to go, Zimmerman said.
"The best stuff we ever do is the stuff that doesn't cost anything," he said.
Zimmerman expressed hope that some form of the program could be resurrected "in a few years when this has all blown over."
