Ohio University students who cycle to campus will no longer need to fret about the lack of bike rack space as bicycles with broken rims and missing seats will soon be taken away.
Not by their owners or petty thieves, but by police officers.
The Ohio University Police Department will be rounding up all abandoned bikes on the Athens campus in mid-June
— something the department has done for about 10 years or so.
OUPD Lt. Tim Ryan said in an email the decision to remove the bikes was made more than a decade ago when the department received complaints about
logjams at OU's bike racks during the summer.
“The lack of bike rack space then began creating safety problems with bikes being chained in walkways and onto handrails,” Ryan said. “Collecting abandoned bicycles has greatly alleviated these problems.”
After informing the students via email, Ryan said officers would mark all the bikes on the Athens campus, typically two weeks after graduation, with colored streamer paper. OUPD then collects all the bikes with the paper attached during a sweep in mid-June.
Officer Tim Woodyard, who is heading up the operation, said OUPD officers typically collect about 120 abandoned bicycles each year.
The bikes are stored on campus for a couple months, Ryan said, to provide time for officers to compare the stolen bike reports with the ones the department collected.
“When we are ready to discard the bikes, we place an ad in a local paper notifying the community,” Ryan said. “ We also seek a court order to have the bicycles forfeited to Ohio University.”
All collected bikes that are not claimed are eventually sold to the public at the Ohio University Auction,
Ryan said.
University College Assistant Dean Jenny Klein, who rides her bike to OU daily, said she was glad that OUPD will be removing all the abandoned bikes from the bike racks.
“It makes it difficult for those of us who ride every day to park” Klein said “It also is an eyesore to have rusting old bikes or pieces of bikes at the bike racks.”
