A free bike-sharing program started by Hobart and William Smith graduate Tarang Malhotra is continuing under campus management, with 20 bicycles students can locate and borrow through an app.
Malhotra and business management and entrepreneurship professor Tom Drennen received Global Sustainability Awards Sept. 12 for their work advancing United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, according to the colleges' account. The ceremony took place at Emory University's Goizueta Business School in Atlanta.
Malhotra, who graduated in May, received the SDG 7 award for Affordable and Clean Energy for establishing BikeHWS. Drennen received the SDG Super Educator Pewter award, the educator category's top honor, for sustainability work that included helping HWS reach carbon neutrality in 2024.
Malhotra now works as an analyst at PEI Global Partners, a private investment bank specializing in power and infrastructure. He said he wanted the campus program to continue after he left.
“It wasn't one of those things that I wanted to see completely die once the student who implements the project graduates,” he said.
From a semester abroad to 20 campus bicycles
An economics and environmental studies double major, Malhotra saw bike sharing integrated into daily life during a semester abroad in Germany in fall 2023. Returning to campus, he questioned car trips that students could make by bicycle.
In spring 2024, he brought Drennen a proposal to update earlier campus bike-sharing efforts. An earlier student-government initiative, the Yellow Bike Project, had rented bicycles to students. Malhotra wanted borrowing to be free.
He researched other colleges' programs, identified On Bike Share as a vendor serving campuses and worked through bicycle selection, colors, costs and operating requirements. Drennen guided him through successive steps, including getting quotes and developing a proposal.
Funding was the main obstacle. Malhotra pitched student government, student engagement and other offices before presenting the idea to Becca Morris, vice president for campus life and dean of students.
Morris connected the proposal with the Presidential Discretionary Fund for Student Support, established by Sana Naylor Brooks and Andrew Brooks. The fund paid for the bicycles, reservation app and operating infrastructure.
Malhotra assembled all 20 bicycles and initially maintained them. He then worked with Campus Life for a year on the transition to long-term management, Morris said.
Campus staff now manage the fleet
Ryan Steinberg, director of student activities and Greek life, now manages the bicycles stationed around campus. Students use an app to locate and check them out at no charge. Steinberg said they are regularly in use.
Drennen's own sustainability interest began as a child visiting Niagara Falls and seeing pollution. He later helped guide the colleges' carbon-neutrality commitment, made in 2007 and achieved a year early in 2024.
Another HWS graduate, Sean Pesin, attended the Atlanta ceremony as a featured speaker. He credited Drennen's Natural Resource and Energy Economics course with starting his interest in sustainability.
Pesin, an economics and psychology graduate now pursuing a master's degree in environmental management at Duke University, recently worked on Voltus' dispatch operations team. He supported 21 emergency demand-response events in which commercial and industrial customers reduced electricity use to help stabilize the grid during peak periods.
For BikeHWS, Malhotra's departure has not ended the program. Campus staff now handle the fleet he spent nearly two years planning, assembling and handing off.
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