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The Daily Tar Heel

Letter: ?Bike-share program is not worth fees

TO THE EDITOR:

Raising the student transit fee even further to expand a bike-share program is ill-conceived. The Tar Heel Bikes is used by a relatively small segment of the undergraduate population that lives primarily on South Campus. Expanding the program shouldn’t be supported by student fees paid by every student in the University community including those off-campus, but rather by the students that use and benefit from it.

This is the model that is actually used in the urban bike share programs Mr. Jariwala references in the article. If the cost is as low as Jariwala states, it is reasonable to ask students to pay a higher program-inscription fee or per-use fee because the Tar Heel Bikes program allows them to avoid buying a more expensive personal bike.

If the rationale is really about helping student to get to class and about convenience, Student Congress would be well served to look at the cost of the Robertson bus program. Currently, undergraduate students and non-joint program graduate students who take classes at Duke pay $5 round-trip. This cost quickly adds up over the course of a semester. Expanding eligibility for the GoPass program on a per-semester basis through a small increase in the student transit fee would benefit a wider group of students.

The Tar Heel Bikes program is a program about convenience for a few whereas the cost of the Robertson buses presents a significant and sometimes prohibitive cost for any student who want to take classes at our neighboring institution.

Izaak Earnhardt ’15

Comparative Literature

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