Center for Appropriate Transport

The Center for Appropriate Transport (CAT) is a non-profit community center dedicated to bicycles and alternative transport. It is near the most extensive river bike trail in the United States,^[1] at 1st and Washington streets in Eugene, Oregon. ^[2]

Inside CAT there are publicly funded educational workshops for teaching youth from ages 12 to 21. Within the 8,000-square-foot (740 m²) facility there is 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.^[3]

History

Jan VanderTuin, a human-powered vehicle engineer with an activist background and a co-founder of the community-supported agriculture (CSA) movement in the U.S., came to Eugene in 1990. 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 Whiteaker neighborhood in Eugene, and CAT was born.

To create the center, VanderTuin gathered the founding core group, which included bicycle retailer and activist Kurt Jensen, writer and racer Jason Moore, Tom Bowerman, and Rain Magazine editors Greg Bryant and Danielle Janes. Bryant was instrumental in bringing Oregon Cycling into CAT, and obtaining non-profit status. CAT opened its doors to the public on November 20, 1992.^[4]

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 few publicly funded bicycle schools in the United States.

References

External links

• Center for Appropriate Transport