A cyclist half rolls, half drags his bike into the shop minutes before it closes for the day. He immediately announces, “My bike is broken. It won’t turn.” Joey Leaming, the self-appointed fresh face of the Des Moines Bike Collective and the sales organizer, searches for a volunteer to help repair the problem: a bike chain. There was no appointment made ahead of time. There was no discussion of payment. The man just brought his broken bicycle into his local bike collective. A volunteer fixed it. He was on his way.
Moments like these are becoming more and more common. The reason: Bike collectives, like this one in Des Moines, are popping up across the Midwest. There’s the MCTC Bike Collective in Minneapolis. The 816 Bicycle Collective in Kansas City.Working Bikes and The Recyclery Collective in Chicago. There are even collectives in smaller cities like Topeka, Kansas, and Madison, Wisconsin. All are non-profits. All survive on the help of volunteers. And all promote the same main goals: providing bike education, partnering with volunteers to help cyclists fix their bikes, promoting sustainable transportation, and providing affordable transportation to the underprivileged.
“Bike collectives make it possible for everyone to have a bike and provide the knowledge to make biking fun, reliable, and incredibly affordable,” says Charles Mitchell, the bike manager at the Community Bike Project in Omaha.
The collectives are perfectly timed. According to The League of American Bicyclists (LAB) 2013 “Where We Ride” report, bicycle commuting grew by 62 percent between 2000 and 2013. In Chicago, 1.4 percent of the city rides their bikes to work. That doesn’t seem like much until you realize that’s over 17,000 riders commuting every day. In Minneapolis, there are over 8,000. In Madison, another 6,700. In fact, in LAB’s ranking of the 50 states by best bicycling populations, Wisconsin placed at No. 12, with 0.8 percent of the entire state’s population pedaling to the office. Oregon topped the list with 2.4 percent of its population commuting to work on two wheels.
But while many collectives advocate for bike commuting, at their core they are about strengthening the cycling community. “We are essentially building a hub for cycling in Kansas City,” says Idris Raoufi, co-founder of Kansas City’s 816. They, like many other collectives, provide tune-ups, offer bike workshops for kids, and host rides. They even build refurbished bikes out of recycled parts and sell them for as little as $25 to people who are homeless, on disability, unemployed, underemployed, or out on parole to help provide reliable transportation to the underprivileged.
Others, like Omaha’s Bike Project, just give bikes away. The Bike Project’s Kids Bike Club gives children in the community the opportunity to earn a bike and a “brain bucket” (helmet) by attending classes about maintenance and safe riding. The adult Earn-a-Bike program allows community members to earn a bike in exchange for volunteering for a set number of hours and paying a small fee for tools. They then have the opportunity to pick a refurbished bike, overhaul it, and ride it off into the sunset as their own.
“For the Bike Project, bikes are a tool for empowerment,” Mitchell says. “Youth and adults have a chance to improve their lives and the lives of others through cycling.”
And that’s the real point: turning pedestrians into commuters, kids into cyclists, and strangers into a community. “Our bikes are our first taste of freedom,” says Andrea Bradshaw, another volunteer at the Des Moines Bike Collective. She has been volunteering here every day for a year. She’s one of the few female volunteers willing to get her hands dirty, building road bikes from the ground up. She loves it. “My friends are here. I also meet people from all socioeconomic backgrounds, but in the collective we are all equal.”
