In early 2003, Gus Gosselin, then director of building services for infrastructure planning and facilities, and Terry Link, former director of the Office of Sustainability, came up with a simple idea to encourage bicycling on campus: repair impounded bikes and loan them out to faculty and staff.
The pair gathered a handful of volunteers—who provided their own tools—and set up shop under an overhang outside a south campus warehouse. Support and demand have grown, and MSU Bikes has since graduated to a full-service shop and repair center located on the north side of the Red Cedar River Trail at the base of Bessey Hall.
Back in ’03, Tim Potter was one of those original volunteers. Today, he is MSU’s sustainable transportation manager and runs the MSU Bikes Service Center. “The mission of MSU Bikes is to help people discover the joys of bicycling—and that’s what we do every day,” says Potter.
Potter, who attended MSU in the early ’80s, has been advocating the benefits of bike-riding to the community for years. “The wonderful thing that bikes provide people on campus, or in any large community, is it makes a big place so much smaller,” he says. “Plus, it’s a great way to connect with the environment and just enjoy your commute.”
In 2021, MSU was designated a gold-level Bike Friendly University by the League of American Bicyclists. Only 31 universities in the U.S. have received the distinction, and Michigan State is the first gold-level higher education institution in Michigan.
“The gold ranking puts us in some pretty rarefied company,” says Aubrey Hoermann, service manager at MSU Bikes. “In the time that I’ve been here, I have seen the bike infrastructure really improve—as well as just the number of people that are out there on bikes.”
The university is attentive to those rising numbers and has been working to accommodate bicyclists for over 20 years. “Right now, on campus, over 70% of our roads have proper bike lanes,” says Potter.
