The Hampshire Community Yellow Bike Program was initiated by student Adam Shapiro (F99) in the Fall of 1999. The program relies on donated bicycles, and volunteered time to keep the bikes in working order.

In the Fall of 2001 Jared Benedict joined in by dedicated his Division III project to developing a computerized check-out type of community bike program. Although existing programs have been developed and implemented in a few communities, this project differs slightly. The most fundamental difference is that our project hopes to promote the original philosophy of community bike programs.

• Community Involvement - Like other less sophisticated community bike programs, the community which it serves is of utmost importance. For community bike programs to be successful, it needs to have involvement, input, and participation from the community itself. And then once implemented, it needs to encourage the encourage the belief of sharing to further strengthen the community.
• Open Information - The implementation of community bike programs should not be impeded by the interest of a single business which has it's own interests in mind. Our project intends to share as much information on our progress, design, and implementation as possible. Our hope is that the community of people which implement community bike programs around the World, can contribute and benefit from our findings. We will share information specific to the Hampshire Community Bike Program here on this web site, and our findings which may be useful for bike programs in general are made available on the communitybike.org web site.

The other slightly different twist to our program, is that we are exploring the use of human powered "kick" scooters instead of bicycles as a means of transportation. For a more in depth description of our reasoning, see the Vehicle Design section of the communitybike.org web site.