Bike-sharing company Zagster could make its Hanover debut within the next year if a team of students backing the program have their way.
Zagster users can rent bikes from a variety of stations around campus with a phone app. The company is currently partnered with over 130 colleges, including half the Ivy League.
This past year, Hannah Carlino ’17 and Nick Ford ’17 partnered with Zagster to bring bike-sharing to Dartmouth. With this program, they intend to reduce the amount of cars on campus and to enhance student life and convenience. The company is still in the process of discussing a launch date with the Dartmouth Sustainability Office, Zagster sales consultant Dave Reed said.
Ford said students could potentially see Zagster bikes on campus by the fall of 2016, which they would be able to use by enrolling in a membership. Although membership details have not yet been announced, students will be able to pay for them through their DA$H accounts.
Carlino thought about bringing a bike-sharing program to Dartmouth after routinely being 10 minutes late to her introductory computer science class. While she did not want to buy her own bike, she said she thought there must be a way to fix her transit problem.
“Me being from New York, I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, Citi Bike would be so nice,’” she said.
Citi Bike is a bike-sharing company that operates in the New York area.
Carlino’s accidental tardiness inspired her to embark on a business venture. She initially wanted to build a bike-sharing program from the ground up.
“I was thinking about starting this company called Big Green Bikes,” she said. “But I wanted to create something that was sustainable and had been proven to work on many different campuses.”
Ford was interning for Zagster under Max Goldberg ’12, a product manager at the company, at the time, and he also hoped to bring a bike-sharing program to Dartmouth.
“I’ve always had an interest in alternative mobility,” Ford said. “I’m from the Detroit area so a lot of that conversation is happening there with the big car companies.”
In May of last year, Carlino and Ford sent out a 30-second survey to see if there was an interest on campus for a bike-sharing program. The results reaffirmed Carlino’s experience of wanting a bike without the responsibility of ownership. Ninety percent of the survey participants said that they would use a bike sharing service twice a day or more, and the main reason that people gave for not owning a bike was that it was too much of a hassle, she said.
Zagster is all-inclusive, Ford said, which means that all operations and maintenance related to the bike share program are included in the cost of the service.
Ford added that Zagster’s app-based locking mechanism would remove the need for physical locks and hold people accountable for damaging and stealing bikes. Zagster would have its members’ credit card or DA$H numbers to make it more difficult to steal a Zagster bike.
The positive response to the initial student survey led to several talks between Dartmouth’s sustainability office and Zagster.
“Every discussion we’ve had has been extremely positive,” Zagster’s marketing chief Nate Taber said. “There is a lot of support on campus.”
Sustainability office director Rosi Kerr has met with Carlino on several occasions and voiced support for the bike sharing program.
Part of Zagster’s appeal is that it is optimized for college campuses. Whereas Citi Bike works well for large cities like New York City by putting all of the technology in kiosks, Zagster’s model attempts to bring bike sharing to college campuses of all sizes by moving the technology to smartphones.
Zagster and Dartmouth’s sustainability office will begin a dialogue about launch dates once Kerr returns from maternal leave. She is the de facto point person in charge of making Carlino and Ford’s proposal come to fruition, Carlino said.
In the meantime, Dart Bike Rentals remains Dartmouth’s only alternative biking initiative. Dart Bike Rentals provides term-long rentals, with organized pick-ups and drop-offs at the beginning and the end of each term. The company could potentially complement Zagster, despite the low-membership fees projected by the latter.
Ford agreed, citing the co-existence of student initiatives like Dart Bike Rentals and Zagster on college campuses that he saw while interning at Zagster.
Zagster’s model offers short-term rentals, while Dart Bike Rentals is geared toward long-term renting.
“We’ve heard from students that most prefer to have a bike they can take all the way to their dorm and not have to return to a station, given our fairly small campus,” Kerr said.
Once Carlino and Ford receive funding and Zagster reaches an agreement with both the sustainability office and the facilities and operations office, students could expect to see Zagster on campus immediately.
“We are ready to launch a program when they are,” Taber said. “We typically launch a program on communities such as Dartmouth in anywhere between four to six weeks, so once we agree on a launch date, we can very quickly have a full-scale program running.”
Students could help quicken Zagster’s arrival on campus by helping Carlino and Ford garner student support, they said. This means letting the administration know that Zagster is something that they would like to see implemented at Dartmouth, as well as encouraging student groups to get involved with the initiative. Currently, both Women in Business and the Dartmouth Entrepreneurship Network are participating.
“If we heard overwhelmingly from students that they wanted Zagster or another bike sharing platform and were willing to help us devise a plan to fund it, I’d be delighted to help make it happen,” Kerr said.
Hannah Carlino ’17 is a member of The Dartmouth business staff
