Bicycle cooperative

File:Sopo Bicycle Cooperative.jpg

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 is a bicycle repair shop, that is usually organized as a volunteer cooperative.

Bike co-ops assist individuals in need of bike repair and maintenance, sell new and used bike parts, sell refurbished bikes, and offer formal bike repair and bike building classes.. Visitors can learn repair skills both for breakdowns on the road and for home repairs. Staff and instructions are typically volunteers.

Costs to users

Shop Time

Some bike co-ops charge users a set fee between $5 USD and $20 USD per hour for "shop time," which is the use of their space and tools. They tend to 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.

Parts

The cost of new or used parts is usually extra, 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

Bike cooperatives can now be found worldwide. The Bike Collective Network wiki includes a list of hundreds of co-ops scattered throughout a few dozen countries. The list is sorted by country and by province or state.

See also

• Bicycle library
• Cycling
• Local bike shop
• Maintenance and repair (in Bicycle): discusses self-service, full-service, and roadside assistance

Further reading

• http://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.
• Community Bicycle Organizations: A list of bike co-ops worldwide, sorted by country and by province/state.
• International Bicycle Fund community bike programs directory. Many of the groups in this directory, though not all of them, are co-ops.
• Bike Workshops Research. Research into bike workshops led by Simon Batterbury, University of Melbourne.