The Enduring Power of Community Bike Shops

Biking is one of the most effective ways to reduce our carbon footprints from transportation.

Compared with car ownership and even monthly public transit passes, regular bicycle maintenance is also very affordable. Especially if you do it yourself, with used parts and borrowed tools.

But how do you learn how to fix your bike? And where can you access used parts and tools?

Enter the community bike shop. While it isn’t a new non-profit business model, it’s a durable one, offering bike sales and maintenance, used parts and often refurbished used bikes. Another key part of the paradigm is the availability, to the public, of the tools and training necessary to fix your own bike.

The Tyee spoke with staff and volunteers from three community bike shops in the Pacific Northwest about their operations, how they keep their costs low and where bicycles fit into the circular economy.

These shops are: Our Community Bikes in Vancouver, Hub City Cycles in Nanaimo and Off the Chain in Anchorage, Alaska. Collectively they have kept more than 10,000 bicycles out of landfills over the last 31 years. That comes to about 135,000 kilograms of steel, aluminum and carbon still cruising the streets.

Our Community Bikes has been a Vancouver institution since 1993. The non-profit social enterprise is dedicated to reducing consumer waste while making cycling and bicycle maintenance more accessible for everyone.

This is achieved through their four core programs: in-shop bike service and sales at its Main Street storefront; the Pedals for the People program, which provides free bikes and subsidized bike maintenance to people in need; Youth Bike Club, teaching 12-to-19-year-olds to build, repair and maintain bikes; and Gear Up, a mechanic training and internship program for people up to age 30, offered in conjunction with the YWCA.

In addition, Our Community Bikes offers temporary and mobile pop-up bike repair shops, helping everyone from schoolchildren to low-income folk access bike maintenance and mechanic skills where they are at.

Sarah Thomas, executive director of Our Community Bikes, estimates the community bike shop keeps nearly 700 bikes out of landfills every year.

Around 200 of those bikes are refurbished and donated to people who need them. Another 100 are refurbished and sold. And the other 400 are stripped, salvaging reusable parts and sending the rest to recycling.

A well-maintained bike can last for decades, Thomas said. The best used bikes you can find for longevity and repairability are 1990s-era mountain bikes, she added.

“So much of it relies on what the components are, the compatibility of those, and if you can still source those components,” Thomas said.

If components such as chain rings are no longer sourceable, for example, then it might take a bit more money to replace the entire crank set.

From customers buying parts or seeking a tune-up to would-be bike mechanics learning skills, Thomas estimates Our Community Bikes serves over 3,500 people annually. The shop is open Wednesday to Saturday from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., and 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Sundays.

Between full time, part time and casual, Our Community Bikes has 18 employees. But it also relies on volunteers to strip bikes for parts, pump up inner tubes and rebuild used and deconstructed bikes.

Bikes, parts and tools are also sourced from donations, as well as new supply purchased for sale in their Main Street storefront.

Our Community Bikes works to reach people who may not feel comfortable at other bike shops. This includes women, queer and trans people, people with low incomes and people with disabilities.

But they also work in symbiosis with commercial shops. Some Gear Up participants complete their six-week practicums at other bike shops in town; other shops donate their outdated stock or direct customers looking for used bikes or parts to Our Community Bikes.

It works in reverse, too: Our Community Bikes will refer customers looking for something specific, like a professional mountain bike or an e-bike, to bike shops that specialize in those bicycles in Vancouver.

“We really specialize here in older bikes and bikes that are highly repairable, which is different from some other shops,” said Thomas.

Cycling in BC’s Hub City

Community bike shops are scalable to both larger and smaller communities.

For example, Nanaimo, population 100,000, is home to Hub City Cycles, a community bike service co-op started by a few Vancouver Island University students in 2012.

Open Tuesday to Saturday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Hub City Cycles is a smaller operation than Our Community Bikes. With just four staff, 11 volunteers and no more than 1,200 square feet of space, they rely on volunteers to fill positions on their board of directors, as well as strip bikes, clean and organize the small shop.

The original founders have since moved on, but Hub City Cycles’ downtown Nanaimo location remains the same, as does its mandate: make commuter biking more accessible by providing mechanic training and a do-it-yourself workspace, and selling refurbished bikes diverted from landfills.

Availing yourself of Hub City Cycles’ services requires a membership. But it’s only $5 — fully refundable — for lifetime use. This gets you access to in-shop bike stands and tools, as well as the ability to volunteer in the shop, attend the annual general meeting and vote for the Hub City Cycles board.

Nico Damiani, a lifelong cyclist, says he faced a steep learning curve when he began working at Hub City Cycles in 2016.

“I knew nothing about bicycle maintenance or how to run a business,” said Damiani, one of Hub City Cycles’ four staff members. “And now I do all the admin work and I build bicycles.”

Hub City Cycles serves approximately 6,000 people annually. Damiani estimates the shop has saved thousands of bicycles from the landfill over the past 12 years.

Members come from all walks of life, he notes, from the financially comfortable to working-class and unemployed people.

Like any business, Hub City Cycles aims to turn a profit. But as a co-op, any profit they do make goes back into either the shop itself, which has recently started offering bike rentals, or increasing workers’ wages.

“We are trying to expand our capacity for parts and product in the shop, to be able to offer more. We’re trying to get better all the time in what we’re doing, get more efficient,” Damiani said.

‘A less shitty Goodwill, but for bikes’

With a population of nearly 300,000 people, the city of Anchorage, Alaska, is about three times bigger than Nanaimo — but less than half the size of Vancouver.

Unlike southern coastal B.C., where mild weather makes for near-optimal cycling conditions year-round, Anchorage’s increased snowfall thanks to climate change gives it a roughly six-month cycling season for all but the hardiest of bike nerds.

“It is really hard to bike on the roads in the winter. But people do it,” said Anders Carlson, a volunteer shift leader at Off the Chain, the non-profit community bike shop in Anchorage.

There are, however, enough cyclists to keep Off the Chain busy year-round, Carlson said. He estimates they serve about 1,000 people annually.

Off the Chain has helped keep about 3,000 bikes out of the landfill in the decade and a half since they opened.

Carlson estimates up to 90 per cent of the bikes they receive need maintenance or repairs before being resold or donated to organizations working with new immigrant families. Off the Chain has sold or donated around 1,500 used bikes since they started keeping records in 2016.

“I like to think of it as a less shitty Goodwill, but for bikes,” Carlson said. “We’ll take in donations from the community, basically anything bike-related, and resell them for a very discounted price.”

Their affordability goal also applies to repairs, Carlson added: “I just helped out this woman who came in and said, ‘I just went to a bike shop and they said it was going to be $300 for them to fix the bike.’ I helped her out and she only paid like $20.”

With some customers experiencing homelessness or making do on a very low income, inability to pay for repairs isn’t a barrier to access Off the Chain.

There is a suggested donation of $5 per hour you use the repair space, and Off the Chain also charges for used parts and bike sales. “Instances where somebody who can’t pay are so few and far between,” Carlson added, “we’re not going to be hard-asses about it.”

Carlson is one of about 35 volunteers who keep the shop running; there are no employees.

“We just want to help people,” Carlson said. Any profit the shop turns is reinvested.

Similar to Hub City Cycles, Off the Chain was started by University of Alaska students. Some of the original founding members are still involved.

There is no official training for volunteers on fixing bikes, though Off the Chain does have a volunteer handbook and holds a few volunteer orientation sessions per year.

They also offer bike maintenance training sessions four times a year — some are just for volunteers, while others are opened up to the community for $10 per class.

More seasoned volunteers help train new volunteers on bike maintenance using a donated bike that needs refurbishing during their initial volunteer shift.

“Hopefully by the end of the shift they have a brand new [refurbished] bike that’s ready to sell, and they get a sense of accomplishment that way,” Carlson said.

The future of bike repair

A self-described “dreamer,” Carlson believes that with demand for greener transportation in the face of human-accelerated climate change, there’s a bigger space for bikes in our economy.

Transportation and logistics can be reframed, he said, so that we rely less on fossil fuels and instead make use of cargo bikes and bike trailers to transport heavier loads.

“I see a shop like Off the Chain being vital for people to live and exist. And I want to help that to grow, so that when the day comes we are ready for it.”

Back in Vancouver, Our Community Bikes again needs to find a bigger location for their storefront and repair shop over the next two years. The shop has both expanded and contracted in the last decade — closing their PEDAL depot near Olympic Village but moving to a bigger storefront than their former East 17th Avenue and Main Street location.

Looking out more broadly over the cycling landscape, Thomas says, the future of bike repair and longevity is at a crossroads.

The pandemic led to a heightened consumer demand for bikes, she says. Manufacturers and online retailers, keen to get as many bikes to market as quickly as possible, started producing bikes with plastic parts, cheaper than the metal components typically used.

But that speed of delivery and reduction in initial ticket price has come with a cost: these bikes aren’t as easy to repair or keep out of landfills as their heavier, more expensive counterparts.

“A colleague from a community bike shop in Colorado said... ‘I used to teach people how to fix their bikes, and now I teach people why their bikes can’t be fixed,’” Thomas said.

But Thomas is hopeful that the right-to-repair movement will catch on and put the kibosh on cheap bikes. Until then, she encourages would-be bicycle buyers to ask bike shop staff lots of questions about repairability and longevity before buying a new bike.

Better yet, buy a used bike from a community bike shop like Our Community Bikes, Thomas said, adding that in addition to volunteer hours and applying for financial grants, they rely on community donations and sales to stay in operation.

“If you’re going to go buy a new helmet, we can sell you a new helmet,” Thomas said. “And then the proceeds go towards helping everything else [we do].”

[Editor’s note: This article runs in a new section of The Tyee called ‘What Works: The Business of a Healthy Bioregion,’ where you’ll find profiles of people creating the low-carbon, sustainable economy we need from Alaska to California. Find out more about this project and its funders.]

Read more: Transportation