QUEST Students Win Award at Maryland Day
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| Vlad Tchompalov accepts the
award for WeBike at Maryland Day |
A team of students and alumni from the Smith School’s
Quality Enhancement Systems and Teams
(QUEST) program won the Best Sustainable Project project award, as voted on
by the public who attended the University of Maryland’s Maryland Day on April 25,
2009. The team—Allison Armitage ’08; Vlad Tchompalov, senior; Brad Eisenberg, senior;
David Olson ’08; and Jacob Portnoy, senior—were recognized for an innovative project
called WeBike.
WeBike is a bike-sharing system similar in arrangement to the popular ZipCar
car-sharing system. Students pay a semester-long subscription fee to rent bikes,
check them out of a WeBike station on campus, and return them when they’re finished.
The stations are solar-powered, and the bikes also have a power source for accessories
like iPods.
Bike storage can be a problem for students living in dorms, so bike-sharing provides
a great way for students to have the benefit of a bike on campus without the hassle
of finding a place to keep it. WeBike’s founders say hope to “reduce automobile
use and to promote fun, innovative, progressive, and green transportation” for fellow
students. It’s a system that would work for any enclosed community, says Allison
Armitage, like suburban neighborhoods, corporate campuses, retirement communities,
and perhaps could eventually be scaled to cities.
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| The WeBike team |
WeBike grew out of a QUEST class project in fall 2007. With the encouragement of
Gerald Suarez, then executive director of QUEST, now associate dean of external
strategy, the students continued to work on WeBike, developing a business model
and creating a trial program on the College Park campus. Last spring the students
incorporated themselves, and their eventual goal is to become a non-profit organization
that provides bike-sharing services to communities and campuses around the country.
The group hopes to install the first WeBike system on the at the University of Maryland
this year, with 40 bikes at two stations on campus.
Currently the system uses RFID technology with swipe-cards to manage bike check-out
and check-in, but Armitage would like to be able to embed the technology into a
bracelet or keychain—something students can wear or carry around with them, so the
option to check out a bike is always available when it is needed.
Armitage is excited about WeBike’s future, not just as a business but as a community-building
activity. “People seemed to be excited about the initiative and what it could do
for campus,” says Armitage. “It’s not only a great form of transportation that allows
people to get where they want to go much more quickly and conveniently, it’s also
fun and would foster community around the biking—rides, events, races where people
can connect with each other.”
