Bicycle Friendly University

Michigan State University| Bronze Level

University Highlights: With an enrollment of over 47,000 students, Michigan State University (MSU) is one of the largest universities in the country. The MSU Bikes Program, an on-campus service and education facility, addresses the bicycle servicing needs of students, staff, and faculty, and rents bikes to visitors to the campus for either short or long term. The Bike Center is taking a proactive approach to bicycle advocacy by offering workshops that address maintenance, appropriate behavior as cyclists on campus and in the wider community. The University also runs the Green Bike program that recycles abandoned and donated bikes for re-use by the university community. To date, over 900 bikes have been salvaged and reused, providing an excellent example of the bicycle’s ability to provide sustainable and environmentally friendly transportation. Further, a Bicycle Facilities Plan (BFP) was developed together with The Greenway Collaborative, Inc., of Ann Arbor in 2007, which complements the Campus Master Plan that has been in place since 2000. The BFP provides a comprehensive set of specific objectives to promote bicycling on campus, education, policy changes. MSU’s commitment to improving bicycling on campus is supported by the university’s administration as demonstrated by the direct financial support of the program from the Vice President of Finance and Operations office.

Most Compelling Recent Bike Related Accomplishment:
In the past decade, MSU added approximately 13 lane miles of on-street bike lanes on campus that all exceed the federal width guidelines. The university now has bike lanes on over 55 percent of its roadways.

Most Compelling Fact: The University’s Just-In-Time program utilizes the returns on the universities endowments to address infrastructure enhancements, which commonly include roadway construction/reconstruction with bike lanes.