Words by Selcha Cain | Photography by The 816 Bike Collective and The Bike Project | April 25, 2015<\/p>\n

A cyclist half rolls, half drags his bike into the shop minutes before it closes for the day. He immediately announces, \u201cMy bike is broken. It won\u2019t turn.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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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\u2019s the MCTC Bike Collective<\/a> in Minneapolis. The 816 Bicycle Collective<\/a> in Kansas City.Working Bikes<\/a> and The Recyclery Collective<\/a> in Chicago. There are even collectives in smaller cities like Topeka, Kansas<\/a>, and Madison, Wisconsin<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cBike collectives make it possible for everyone to have a bike and provide the knowledge to make biking fun, reliable, and incredibly affordable,\u201d says Charles Mitchell, the bike manager at the Community Bike Project in Omaha.<\/p>\n

The collectives are perfectly timed. According to The League of American Bicyclists (LAB) 2013 \u201cWhere We Ride\u201d report<\/a>, 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\u2019t seem like much until you realize that\u2019s over 17,000 riders commuting every day. In Minneapolis, there are over 8,000. In Madison, another 6,700. In fact, in LAB\u2019s ranking of the 50 states by best bicycling populations, Wisconsin placed at No. 12, with 0.8 percent of the entire state\u2019s population pedaling to the office. Oregon topped the list with 2.4 percent of its population commuting to work on two wheels.<\/p>\n\n\n

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But while many collectives advocate for bike commuting, at their core they are about strengthening the cycling community. \u201cWe are essentially building a hub for cycling in Kansas City,\u201d says Idris Raoufi, co-founder of Kansas City\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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