Students will have the opportunity to zip from one end of campus to the other on electric bicycles at the start of next fall quarter. The electric bicycles come as part of a $1 million grant from the Washington State Department of Transportation to help reduce trip times around the U-District.

There will be a total of 40 bikes available to students, faculty and staff equally dispersed among four stations situated around campus. The stations will most likely be on the edges of the campus, although planning has not yet been finalized. The bikes can go up to 25 mph unassisted by the rider and have a 25-mile average range on their batteries.

"You just go straight to a station, zip off in a vehicle and bring it back," said Mitchell Magdovitz, the director of business development at Intrago, the makers of the electric bikes. "The idea is [that] it will be more convenient than your car is for the local trip."

The University's current policy is to cut down on the amount of single occupancy vehicles visiting the campus on a daily basis. The U-PASS and other measures taken by the University reflect this policy. The electric bicycles are among the latest additions to these efforts.

"One of the key ideas we do in managing transportation demand in general is we want to make it easy to do the right thing, to move in a way that has the smallest possible [carbon and physical] footprint," said Josh Kavanagh, the director of the UW's transportation department. "In the environment of the UW campus where there are some significant hills, [the bicycles] will appeal to the people who want to do the right thing but maybe aren't ready to pedal all the time."

The decision to implement these bicycles comes among a backdrop of arguments surrounding transportation solutions for high-density urban environments. Magdovitz highlights two opposing solutions. The first is to develop hybrid cars and other types of vehicles that are friendlier to the environment.

"What [auto-manufacturers] don't

address with that model is that even if every car does no harm to the environment, it does nothing to solve traffic congestion and the inefficiencies of the one car, one driver model," Magdovitz said.

The other model focuses on getting people out of their cars and champions pedestrians, bikers and transit users.

Intrago's electric bicycles fall in the middle of this transportation spectrum, reconciling the needs of motor vehicle users and the space constraints of the urban environments.

"We are bringing to the future of transportation a blending of the automobiles side [in that] you don't have to give up a personal, powered vehicle, but also a small vehicle that makes sense for a local trip," Magdovitz said.

The implementation of these bicycles comes as part of the solution to the "last-mile" problem associated with how to effectively get consumers from transit centers and bus stops to their workplaces, classrooms or other destinations. The idea is to use transit or drive a car, but only park once and then utilize "last mile" types of transportation like electric bicycles, Magdovitz said.

"The technology is very new and this is the first pilot they've implemented, so there's not a lot of experience with this technology, but from the outside perspective it looks like it has merit and it's great that the UW is taking the lead in that," said Franz Loewenherz, a senior transportation planner for Bellevue.

[Reach reporter Andrew Doughman at news@thedaily.washington.edu.]