bike building

Two weeks ago, I got to help with a very cool program. The DC Public School system, with support from the DC DOT, decided that every kid should know how to ride a bike. They could teach it as part of the PhysEd curriculum, and aim at second graders, who would be old enough to grasp the basics without being old enough to fear falling or looking silly in front of their friends.

The problem was getting enough bikes.

That's where the crowd of volunteers came in.

Revolution Cycles, a local chain of bike stores (I feel like there's a pun in there, but I'll let it slide), took the lead in ordering the bikes and organizing the work force. They recruited several of their customers and staff to build bikes for a week in August (I was out of town then) in a hot, breezeless warehouse in northeast DC. Last month, they built the second round, and I was there for it. So were many more volunteers. More, even, than Revolution had expected. On the first day, we built four hundred balance bikes (no pedals, no brakes, no problems) and over 120 sixteen-inch bikes (pedals and coaster brakes).

The storage room looked like Christmas morning.

These took more time to unpack from the boxes than they took to assemble.

For the next two days, we built sixteen- and twenty-inch bikes (the twenty-inch bikes introduced hand brakes), bringing the week's total to 875 bikes, almost twice what was built in August. The build was such a popular project that the woman in charge of recruiting volunteers was contacted by half a dozen people Tuesday night asking if they could come help, too. The Washington Redskins wanted to build bikes, but by the time she heard from them, we actually had more help than we needed. In fact, we finished the build two days earlier than expected.

We built so many bikes so quickly that they ran out of room in the warehouse, and had to begin distributing the bikes to schools just to make room for us to continue working. For me, the funniest part was that the work I did was mostly taking boxes from pallets and moving finished bikes to storage. I only built one bike, at the end of the last day, when the pallets were empty and we had started storing the finished bikes in our build room, because we were once again out of storage elsewhere. Still, I had a lot of fun helping, and every time I see a news item about the kids getting to learn to ride because of that week of work, it makes me feel really good. Bikes are freedom.

(I am not artful enough here to properly embed the video, but one of the other volunteers made a time lapse of part of our last day of building. You can see it here.)