Purple Bike Coalition

Purple bike coalition

Bikes for All

The Purple Bike Coalition (PBC) is Williams College’s free bike service organization, run and staffed by students. Our work is made possible by the Center for Environmental Studies, The Zilkha Center for Environmental Initiatives, College Council and Campus Safety and Security.

This has been a big year for the PBC! After inheriting the leadership of the organization in a very abrupt way, we have built strongly on the foundations laid by our predecessors.

The major task of this year has been designing and implementing Purple Bike Rentals (PBR) program, along with all the organizational and infrastructural improvements required to build and manage a fleet of rental bikes. These improvements include fixing up bikes for the program (tripled our fleet over the course of the year to 35 bikes) overhauling our shop, training and hiring several new mechanics, building a new website (check us out at sites.williams.edu/bikes), and a system of online forms for registrations, waivers, rental requests, rental scheduling and repair/maintenance records that enables us to handle the logistics of the rental system.

As always, we offer free bike repair services to students, faculty and staff during the school year, and we have worked to expand these hours and make them more consistent. In addition, we reached out to wider portion of the campus through several “Bike Repairs and Waffles” events on Paresky steps, and by providing bikes and mechanical support for the Real Food group’s Farm Bike Tours.

-Adie Mitchell ‘15 and Ben Corwin ‘15