It’s been a great pleasure to help start this network for campus bike programmers around N. America back in 2007 (ish) with Tim Ledlie from Harvard’s bike program (Quad Bikes). It all started as an Excel spreadsheet of information that I created to help me better understand how other universities were handling their bike services. Quad Bikes was the only university-based bike shop that we could find at the time that had published their business plan, so we were in touch with Tim about borrowing their business plan to launch MSU Bikes, which we did in 2006.
I also need to give Jim Rogers of U of WI, Madison, due credit and thanks for all his help with keeping our network going. He helped me maintain and manage the network when it was a good old-fashioned Listserv and then helped us transition to the current Google group format. He’s since retired, but has still assisted me from time to time which has been much appreciated.
Anyway, 20 years of managing MSU Bikes seemed like a good round number at which to hand things over to the next manager, who is Aubrey Hoermann, the new “me” here at MSU Bikes. He’s been working here as our Service Manager for the past 8 years and is now in charge of this ship (some days I’ll refer to it as a circus, like this morning when we had 6 different customers come thru our doors within 10-15 minutes which represented some 12 people and their bike needs!).
I’m not planning on moving or leaving the network, so hope to stay loosely involved in the coming years where it seems appropriate. If I get bored I might try my hand at consulting. We’ll see.
I can be contacted via email here.
Stay upright!
Tim
