Center for Appropriate Transport

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The Center for Appropriate Transport (CAT) is an innovative non-profit community center, dedicated to bicycles and alternative transport. It is near the most extensive river bike trail in the USA, at 1st and Washington in Eugene, Oregon.

Inside CAT, one can find publicly-funded educational workshops for teaching youths from ages 12-21. Within the 8000 square foot facility exists a public bicycle repair workspace and a bike machine-shop for the design and manufacture of special-purpose bikes, particularly cargo bikes and recumbents. There is also a bike museum on site, a bike rack building workshop, a sewing facility and the publishing offices of Oregon's only cycling magazine, Oregon Cycling. CAT is also home to Pedaler's Express, a pioneering workbike-based delivery service. CAT has inspired hundreds of similar projects, and centers, since its inception in 1992.

CAT exists because Jan VanderTuin came to Eugene in 1990. As a human-powerd vehicle engineer with an activist background, his most notable previous success was as co-founder of the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) movement in the US. He was searching for a framebuilder to make his designs and a site for a center based on European facilities he had seen where many projects came together to share a large, abandoned building. While sharing a work space with recumbent pioneer Dick Ryan, he connected with local builders Burley Design Coop, Bike Friday and Co-Motion but eventually began building his own frames under the name Human Powered Machines(HPM).

While looking for a site in which to expand HPM and to create an educational facility, VanderTuin met Tom Bowerman, a local activist/builder/entrepreneur and made a proposal for a center. Tom Bowerman and a crew including VanderTuin then secured and renovated a former sheet-metal shop in the Whitaker neighborhood in Eugene, and CAT was born.

To create the center, VanderTuin gathered a support group. He convinced a number of people that an educational center and a fabrication facility making load-bearing bicycles could succeed in a bike-friendly city like Eugene. The core group included bicycle retailer/activist Kurt Jensen, writer/racer Jason Moore, Tom Bowerman, and Rain Magazine editors Greg Bryant and Danielle Janes. VanderTuin, Janes and Bryant believed that by combining Rain Magazine's appropriate technology publishing background with VanderTuin's skills and goals that CAT would flourish. Bryant was instrumental in bringing Oregon Cycling into CAT.

CAT opened its doors to the public on November 20, 1992.

Within a few years CAT and Rain Magazine were no longer partners and by 1995 the emphasis turned to youth education when CAT began contracting with local school districts to work with youth in need of a hands-on education. CAT is an alternative education program registered with the Oregon Department of Education and as such is one of the only publicly-funded bicycle schools in the USA.

[edit] External links

• Center for Appropriate Transport