Community Bikes Being Steered By New Direction

By David Heins

Are you looking for a free ride? How about a chance to help fix up your community? Do you want to have a positive impact on the kids in your neighborhood? The answer may be as simple as changing the tire on an old bike.

The City of Charlottesville has been letting volunteers ride away with free bikes for five years now. In Charlottesville’s non-profit Community Bike Shop, volunteer, youths and adults can earn a bike to keep. Putting in four hours of volunteering is the way locals are learning bike maintenance and safety.

While fixing up old donated bikes, participants are pitching in on a massive recycling program aimed at getting more folks on wheels and creating a safe place for the neighborhood.

A new coordinator, Shelly Stern, has brought fun and enthusiasm to the project. Stern has implemented several activities that have been very popular.

The “bike-in movie” series featured outdoor screenings of cycling cult films all summer long. The most popular were "Napoleon Dynamite" and "I Heart Huckabees". In tandem with the Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative, a film series called Filmed By Bike added independent films to the screenings.

A new “Ladies Night” has started meeting on Wednesdays, when women can come in and work on their bikes with no guys allowed.

In October, the Community Bike Shop hosted a "Critical Mass-querade" of costumed cyclist through town.

This week, after community bikes closed up shop for the day, the members participated in a portable four-course meal. They rode from house to house eating a different course at each stop.

“We are looking at collaborating with other folks in the community to see how we can address car and biker safety issues, and we are focusing on promoting the sense that we really do share the road,” Stern said.

She is also excited about planning a spring bike festival.

The workshop, in a warehouse by the train tracks on West Main, is a hodgepodge of metal and rubber. Rows of rusty old bikes hang from the leaky ceiling. Piles of wheels fill one corner. The walls are lined with paint buckets loaded with salvaged gears, brakes and other useful parts from donated bikes. It may feel like chaos, but it is a labor of love.

Josh Vanhorn has been volunteering here for more than three years. “We’ve definitely been organizing it a bit more. Now were tagging things in a different manner. I think it is much more efficient.”

“It’s pretty sweet,” said Ross Thomas, who has been a volunteer here for more than month.
On Fridays and Saturdays, the two garage doors are opened and the place is filled with activity. Local cyclists and volunteers from the University of Virginia as well as from the activist community are on hand to assist eager patrons who want to build their own ride.

Vanhorn wants people to know that they can always donate bikes. “We also need money to buy certain things that can’t be reused, like brake cables. We also always seem to be running low on tires.”

Stern and her core team of volunteers have also begun enforcing a new set of rules to keep the shop less chaotic and make sure the bikes leave in safe condition.
⊗ No more than five children under age 16 are allowed in the shop at one time.
⊗ Only two patrons are allowed per volunteer.
⊗ A parent or someone over 21 must accompany children under age 7.

Before these rules were enforced, it was not uncommon to see a youngster work hard to get a bike and then have it claimed by an unruly child or group that did not want to help earn one of their own.

“That used to be an issue, but it hasn’t been happening. In the past few months, the shop has been running much better. Over the summer we cut down on a lot of the delinquency factors,” Vanhorn said.

Theft has always been a reality for the program. Born out of a “Yellow Bikes” program, administered by the city and funded by private resources, about 80 bright yellow bikes were scattered around the city in March 2002. After only a few weeks, most of the bikes had been taken and repainted for personal use.

Even though bike theft may have discouraged its progress, the shop has benefited from it as well. Many stolen bikes that are abandoned and unclaimed get donated to the shop by police.

The city’s Community Bike Shop is a new take on a concept popular in European and American cities. In America, 33 states have community bike programs with a total of about 92 individual programs of various models.

Many community bike programs fix up bikes and put them around the community for anyone to use. This model is called “fix and release.” The focus of several of these programs has evolved into distributing the bikes to specific community members who need them.

Programs in some large cities use library-style checkout systems and even credit cards to combat the problem of sticky fingers. Others use the “ugly factor” or features like solid wheels to make their bikes less desirable to theft and resale. Huge ads are hung over the community bikes of Belgrade and Paris.

The volunteers at Charlottesville’s Community Bike Shop are pedaling full speed ahead on this project and the new direction has made them feel more successful than ever. Volunteers are always welcome, and no appointments are necessary.
For more information, visit www.cvillecommunitybikes.org