Chicago’s St. Xavier University unveiled a new bike sharing program with environmentally friendly goals in mind. The Green Bike Program allows students and faculty to check out bikes using their Cougar cards. Bikes are unhooked from their docks with a swipe of an ID card and renters are allowed to use them for as they need them. Bikes are then returned to their docks. At the moment, rentals are free. In the fall the university plans to make the program free for the first 15 minutes and then 60 cents for every 15 minutes after that. The university hopes that students will ride the bikes in between classes and on errands instead of jumping in their cars and driving, thereby reducing the impact on the environment.

St. Xavier paid around $60,000 for the bikes, which were provided by a French company called Veloway. The implementation of the program at the university level is part of a larger effort to bring bike sharing to the city of Chicago. Proposals were made to the city two years ago by the same company providing the bikes. Officials with the city of Chicago state that they are hoping to make bike sharing possible by 2010. They are looking at other cities, like Paris, that have bike sharing programs as an example for how to implement a successful program.