Those who cried out against the new campus bike permit plan’s $15 registration fee can breath a sigh of relief. It’s over.

UK Parking and Transportation Services — who designed the permit plan and announced it last week — said in a campus wide e-mail Friday that the fee would be eliminated. The $15 was part of a new program that will start in July mandating that all bikes parked on campus have a permit. The fee would have been for a lifetime registration, and from July until March 2010, the cost had planned to be waived.

Even though it would have cost bike riders less than a large pizza and cheese sticks from Mad Mushroom, a number of people protested the price and Parking and Transportation Services responded by eliminating the fee.

“Unfortunately, the fee component of the bicycle registration plan diverted the attention away from the positive aspects of the program,” a Friday news release from Parking and Transportation Services stated. “As a result, (Parking and Transportation Services) will continue to advocate for additional bicycle facilities and services, but will support these efforts through established revenue structures.”

Now, instead of bikers paying the fee (if they didn’t make it by the Parking and Transportation Services office in the next 10 months) for services they use, it will come out of Parking and Transportation Services’ general fund.

“There will be challenges with the uncertainty of funding and its influence on the program’s flexibility,” said Parking and Transportation Services Director Don Thornton in an e-mail to the Kernel. “However, we do not want the funding issue to jeopardize the program and its benefits. PTS will establish program priorities and complete them as funding becomes available.”

When funding becomes available.

With UK and Kentucky in a budget crunch, the services the $15 would have covered — including adding new bike racks around campus — could lose priority.

In tough budget times when professors aren’t receiving bonuses and program funding has to be cut, finding money is tricky. Every new program comes at the cost of another. A fee that comes out of students’ tuition pays for some student services like the Johnson Center. It is possible that in the future Parking and Transportation Services could turn to this kind of option to be able to fund new bike racks, bike lanes or other programs. It could turn out that every student — even those who don’t own bicycles — could be paying for something that should have been paid for by a small group purchasing a lifetime permit.

Nothing in life is completely free — not exercising at the Johnson Center, going to the doctor at University Health Services, parking a car on campus, tutoring at the Hub or a library open 24 hours a day. Why would students think registering their bike would be any different?

And the permit program has benefits outside of funding shiny new bike racks. Registering a bike helps track it if it is ever impounded or stolen. For stolen bikes, students can claim the loss with their insurance company because documentation of ownership exists through the permit.

This service will still be provided for students only at the cost of putting a sticker on their bike — something that was also hard to stomach.

“I really don’t want to put a sticker on my bike,” engineering freshman Heath Phillips said in an April 8 Kernel article. “If I’m buying a new bike, I don’t want to put a sticker on it.”

The permit — much like a parking pass — will still be required by Parking and Transportation Services to park a bike on campus. The permit is a good thing that will help students in the long run. Parking and Transportation Services should have weathered the storm of criticisms that came out over the past couple of weeks and stuck to its $15 guns.

Students would have benefited in the long run.