Bicycle cooperative

Assisted-service bicycle repair at the Sopo Bicycle Cooperative in Atlanta, Georgia

A bicycle cooperative ("bike co-op"), bicycle kitchen, bicycle collective, or community bike shop^[1] is an assisted-service bicycle repair shop, usually organized as a volunteer cooperative.

Bike co-ops assist individuals who are in need of bike repair and maintenance. They often sell new and used bike parts as well as refurbished bikes, and offer formal bike repair and bike assembly classes.^[2] Visitors can learn repair skills both for breakdowns on the road and for home repairs. Staff and instructors are normally volunteers.

Costs to users

Shop time

Shop time is considered to be the use of the bike co-op's space and tools. Some bike co-ops charge users a set fee of between US$5 and US$20 per hour. Some bike co-ops will waive the fees for low-income users. Bike Pirates in Toronto is one example of a co-op which uses a pay what you want strategy. They request that each user make a donation.^[3]

Co-ops with lower overhead costs are often more relaxed about cost recovery. For example, one co-op inside an Australian "community environment park" existed rent-free until recently. That co-op continued to charge just $8 USD for a one-year membership, including unlimited shop time, even after it began paying rent.^[4]

Parts

The cost of new or used parts is usually added to the shop fee, but is typically substantially below retail prices. Some workshops stock new items such as brake pads, inner tubes, and bearings.

Parts may be sourced from public donations. Children's bikes are often donated when they are outgrown, and abandoned bikes are sometimes obtained from police stations, street cleaning firms, or from large institutions such as schools and universities.

Locations

An early bike co-op was the Fahrrad.Selbsthilfe.Werkstatt, founded in 1983 in a formerly squatted factory in Vienna, Austria. Another early co-op was "P'tit vélo dans la tête", founded in Grenoble, France, in 1994.

Later, some bike co-ops were founded on the west coast of the US. One example is the Bike Kitchen,^[5] founded in 2003 in San Francisco.

Bike co-ops can be found worldwide. The Bike Collective Network includes a regionally-sorted list of hundreds of co-ops scattered across a few dozen countries.^[1]

See also

• Bicycle § Maintenance and repair: discusses self-service, full-service, and roadside assistance
• Bicycle library: a facility for lending bicycles and accessories to riders for trial or use
• Cycling
• Local bike shop
• Makerspace
• Repair Café
• Tool library

References

Further reading

• Duregger, Michelle (30 April 2010). "The Anti-Shop". Bicycling. Retrieved 9 June 2015. The Recyclery is Oklahoma City's first bike co-op, open three days a week. Everything is free--tools, advice from bicycle-savvy volunteers, workshops, parts and frames. It's stocked by donations from community members and a couple of bike-shop employees, and is run by volunteers. 
• Forbes, Rob (28 April 2009). "Bike Kitchens: Building Community, Bikes". Yes! Magazine. Retrieved 9 June 2015. 
• Cross, Kim (20 February 2015). "The Fixer". Bicycling. Retrieved 9 June 2015. The popular connotation is that co-ops are for urban twenty-somethings who want a fixed-gear bike. But they're more for people who don't know anything about bikes, want a community to connect with, or want a cheap and super-easy mode of transportation. 
• Narciso, Dean. "Bicycle co-op helps local enthusiasts learn to do repairs". The Columbus Dispatch. Retrieved 1 November 2015. 
• sheldonbrown.com/measure.html: Precise measurements are often needed so bicycle parts will assemble correctly. It is usual to perform many of these measurements with special tools which you aren't going to carry around in your on-road toolkit. Also, some of these tools have only a single use, and they can be rather expensive.

External links

• Bike Collective Network: an umbrella association of bike co-ops and other organizations
• Bike Workshops Research: research into bike workshops led by Simon Batterbury, University of Melbourne

Lists of co-ops worldwide

• Community Bicycle Organizations: a list of bike co-ops worldwide, sorted by country and province/state
• International Bicycle Fund community bike programs directory. Many of the groups in this directory, though not all of them, are co-ops.