The recent wave of ominous pink bicycle flyers warning of doubled fines and increased enforcement turned out to be a fraud by geniuses incapable of spelling “safety” (it was spelled “saftey”), but one of the reasons it seemed believable is that the Department of Public Safety does in fact flyer and collect abandoned bikes. While this policy is logical and helpful, the process of reselling impounded bikes could use improvement.

If a bike is left unattended and noticed by Public Safety officials, it will be tagged with a warning flyer and impounded if it is still there after 14 days. Generally bikes are noticed because of missing parts, flat tires or rusted chains. After 90 days of impoundment, bikes are given to charity, destroyed or sold at a special “Bicycle Re-Cycle” sale for Stanford students, faculty and staff.

At the sale, everyone with a valid Stanford ID card can buy up to two bikes for the blanket price of $27 each. Sounds like a great deal, right? The problem is that according to the DPS website the next sale will be October 25, 2007. The first day of the 2007 fall quarter is September 24, almost exactly a month before. It does not make any sense to have a large, discounted bike sale a month into the beginning of the year, a point when most new students in the market for bikes will already have found them.

While the Department of Public Safety (DPS) did not respond to repeated queries about why the sale takes place in October, it is hard to believe that there would be any reasonable motive for the current date, and harder still to conclude that the date cannot be changed.

The first week of school would be an excellent time for the DPS to resell the bikes it has collected, and the increased demand at the time might even allow it to charge a moderately higher price. Buying a used bike on the cheap from a friendly representative of the campus police would also help new students get off on the right foot with Stanford’s often-maligned law enforcement.

Moving the impounded bike resale would undoubtedly lure some prospective buyers away from the Campus Bike Shop, but an important resource is currently going unutilized by the members of the Stanford community who would be benefit most by it.