The future is uncertain for the Tandem Taxi service that has provided free transportation to students for the past two years. The program might temporarily stop after University bicycle coordinator David Niles resigns from his position in mid-June and the University Office of Public Safety re-evaluates the service.
The bicycle service, which provides transportation during the day to students who are injured or have a disability and is open to all of the campus population at night, aims to provide students a safe alternative to walking alone. Tandem Taxi employees are in contact with OPS during their shifts and can call for help in case of an emergency.
Niles, who is resigning because he feels the service and transportation in general are not a perfect fit for an OPS-run program, said the program accommodates about 20 passengers on an average school day but might be abandoned after he leaves his position on June 16.
He said OPS has not yet determined whether it will continue the program.
OPS director Tom Fitzpatrick said OPS is currently working on a plan to re-evaluate the program over the summer.
Fitzpatrick said the service might stop for some time during the summer while OPS looks at how many passengers have been using the service and whether demand is sufficient to continue the program next year.
OPS parking and transportation manager Rand Stamm said the service has wound down in past summers because the campus population diminishes. Stamm said OPS will use some time during the summer to look at such criteria as ridership and the value the service has provided to cam
pus over the past couple of years
before making any decisions.
“At this point, we haven’t made any concrete decision,” Stamm said.
Sophomore psychology major Chris Stein said he has never used Tandem Taxi himself, but sometimes sees tandems providing rides to passengers at night time. The first time Stein saw a Tandem Taxi, he was surprised, he said.
“I was like ‘wow, a bike taxi,’” he said.
Tandem Taxi has kept a log listing its passengers during the past few months. Stamm said the log will help evaluate ridership by providing some concrete numbers.
Niles said Tandem Taxi operates with four bikes, three of which are not owned by the University but borrowed from Bike Friday, a local bicycle manufacturer. He said it is unclear whether the bicycle shop will continue to provide the three loaned tandems after he leaves. The program employs about 10 students who mostly work night shifts.
“It’s really not an OPS program,” Niles said. “The fit that I had with them was not good.”
The decision to add the Tandem Taxi program to OPS came after Niles approached the University with his idea about such a service in 1996. Niles said after a number of programs showed no interest in operating the service, the administration decided that Tandem Taxi would become a part of OPS.
Niles criticized the placement of Tandem Taxi under OPS because, he said, for OPS, transportation is not a priority but, rather, is among many areas it is responsible for.
Niles said that the service might be able to advocate for alternative modes of transportation more effectively if it were operated by a program that worked toward such ideas.
“I see the University to be an incredible model for potential transportation,” he said.
Niles said beyond the concrete service of getting passengers to their destinations safely and free of cost, the program also has a symbolic purpose.
He said he believes that if people see such alternative modes of transportation as bicycles and tandems around campus and the community, those modes of transportation will become more acceptable.
“One thing that [the service] does is it presents an image, which is important,” he said. “The Tandem Taxi was one way of infiltrating the established images that surround us on a daily basis.”