Bike!Bike! 2011

Bike!Bike! 2011 was held in San Marcos, Texas; hosted by The Bike Cave and The San Marcos Community Bike Project. It took place from June 23-26th, 2011.

Schedule

Wednesday June 22

1:00-6:00pm	Pick up a loaner bike (if you're staying the night in Austin) at Austin's Yellow Bike Project
2:00pm - 6:00pm	Open house at UT's Orange Bike Project
6:00 -10:00pm	Open house at Austin's Yellow Bike Project
11:00pm	Open house at Movemint Bike Cab Co. Shop (1301 east 4th street)

Thursday June 23

11:00am - 1:00pm	Pick up your loaner bike (if you've just arrived in Austin) at Austin's Yellow Bike Project
1:00pm	Group ride from Austin's Yellow Bike Project to San Marcos (there will be a truck to take your things to San Marcos)
12:00 - 8:00pm	Check-In at San Marcos Public Library ($25 - $45, pay what you can, nobody will be turned away for lack of funds. Pick up your loaner bike and housing arraignments)
2:00 - 8:00pm	Fix up your bike at The Bike Cave
7:00 - 8:00pm	Welcome / Speak up & speak out!
8:00pm - 10:00pm	Casual welcome dinner at City / Plaza Park with music by Mariachi Nueva Generacion
9:30pm	A screening of "Dudey Free Zone: Women's and Transgender Bike Spaces" plus other short bike-related films. At The Bike Project

Friday June 24

8:00am - 1:00pm	Check-In continued for those who get here late at The Bike Project
8:00 - 9:00am	Yoga (including a light breakfast)
8:30 - 9:30am	Breakfast
9:30am - 11:00am
11:15am - 12:45pm	Workshops
1:00 - 2:30pm	Lunch
2:30 - 4:00pm	Workshops
4:15pm - 5:45pm	Workshops
8:00pm - 9:00pm	The future of Bike! Bike! - a discussion to figure out where we're heading, and how we're getting there. A preview of which project(s) are interested in hosting in 2012.
7:00pm - 10:30pm	Bike polo on top of Speck Street Parking Garage (there will be a group ride leaving from Rio Vista at 6:00pm)
8:00 -11:00pm	Concert at The Bike Project

Saturday June 25

8:00 - 9:00am	Yoga (including a light breakfast)
8:30 - 9:30am	Breakfast
9:30am - 11:00am	Workshops
11:15am - 12:45pm	Workshops
1:00 - 2:30pm	Lunch
2:30 - 4:00pm	Workshops
4:15pm - 5:45pm	Workshops
9:00pm - 12:00am	BIKE! RIDE! BIKE! RIDE!
12:00am - ???	Dance party

Sunday June 26

8:00 - 9:00am	Yoga (including a light breakfast)
8:30 - 9:30am	Breakfast
9:30 - 11:00am	Workshops / final brainstorm
11:15am - 1:00pm	Closing meeting, Bike! Bike! 2012 discussion

Workshops

Managing social rides to promote bicycling

Description

From fringe to mainstream: how social cycling can ... and make our cities better

Details

Held at 11:15 AM on Friday, June 24 at the Bike Cave.

Elliott McFadden of Austin on Two Wheels and Violet Crown Cycles started by describing his views of cycling promotion and two methods seen in Austin of directly working to get people riding bikes. After this, he answered questions in a general discussion format.

Notes

Failures in bicycle promotion

Elliot identified two somewhat conflicting methods of increasing cycling from the cycling industry and from political advocacy.

• Industry: Bicycle sales in the U.S. have remained stagnant over since the 1970s, despite significant growth in population. To increase sales, the bicycle industry has focused on making bikes more niche -- selling new bikes to their existing market.
• Advocacy: Advocates lobby decision makers for better infrastructure, but do so without growing a grassroots bicycle population or establishing cycling within the community.

Until bicycling is seen as a normal community behavior, bicyclists will continue to be classified by convenient stereotypes, like the spandex/carbon weekend warrior, the hipster scofflaw, and the sanctimonious environmentalist.

Strategy

Defining "regime" as an interconnected group of businesses and leaders with a common world view, Elliott noted that the current regime is in favor of growing consumption and fossil fuel use. At the national level, this means the oil and auto industries. At the local level, it includes developers, auto dealers, and news entities, whose future profits depend on growth. Tellingly, 30% of all ad revenue for media entities comes from car companies.

Regime change must then be the goal of a bicycle promoter. Find negative ways to describe the current regime (dirty, expensive, destructive, long travel times in cars) and positive ways to describe the desired regime (healthy, thrifty, sustainable, quality family time). Form partnerships with businesses and organizations that can benefit from a new regime.

Social cycling

To replace the negative stereotypes of bicyclists, it is important to develop an atmosphere that encourages riding by more members of the community. Bicycling should be made to be more comfortable -- no races, no work-outs, regular clothes, open to everyone. The joys of being out, riding with regular people, should be paramount.

Commuting is often a big sell by industry and advocates; it allows shops to sell specialized "commuter" bicycles and advocates to focus on connecting routes, but as a sales point, it has two crippling problems: nobody likes to go to work, and most people go to work alone. Instead, social cycling should be a focus: just get many people together to ride bikes. Austin has two models that work in tandem: Social Cycling Austin and Austin on Two Wheels, an "affiliated business concept".

Social Cycling Austin

Social Cycling Austin is a volunteer production started two years ago as a free ride -- participants just show up for a weekly social ride, drawing 200-300 riders on average and as many as 500. It partners with local businesses, usually a bar or restaurant, and rides with traffic, not against it.

This model is easy to start (it just requires two people) and its open structure makes it accessible to all. It doesn't have to be affiliated with any business, so it can work with and for everyone. Because of its loose nature, it's easy to change what doesn't work or even dismantle the ride. It doesn't need any investment to start up, as most organizing can be done through social networks and guerrilla marketing.

Unfortunately, it also has no control over who shows up, making it difficult to deal with troublemakers and easy for the ride to grow beyond the capacity of the leaders or prevent the ride from being co-opted by other organizations. A focus on bars as a final destination also makes it easy for this sort of ride to turn into a "booze cruise", adding additional challenges to the organization and often depressing its ability to draw women riders. Additionally, it is easy for organizing volunteers to burn out and the undefined liability might cause problems in case of injury.

Affiliated Business Concept

In an affiliated business concept, the rides are run as a business, usually as smaller fee-based rides than as large-scale free-for-alls.

Because a business controls the ride, it's possible to tailor rides for specific demographics; women, families, suburbanites, etc. It's also easier to get different business partners and variety in the ride -- restaurants may provide food and drink samples, galleries may partner for art rides, or retail establishments for shopping rides. A business is also better able to provide a clear line of liability in case of accident and maintain a paid staff of ride leaders and organizers to provide a higher level of service. Austin on Two Wheels, for example, capped rides at 50 participants and provided one ride leader for every ten people to watch over unlocked bikes and help keep rides safe.

This concept also carries some challenges. Partners must be committed to growth; it can take 18-24 months for the concept to turn a sustainable profit and its longer-term viability has not been tested, though it may be a reasonable loss leader for a bike shop. It also limits partnerships to a single member of each sector; one bike shop, one newspaper, or one boutique. The clear line of liability also means that the operating business has insurance requirements to carry and will likely have to enforce helmet use.

Discussion

Both rides appeal to different people, but the demographics of the riders were mostly white, though unintentionally so. For the open social rides, this was because the ride started from one social circle and its business preferences. For the paid rides, this was because they were seeking sustainable income. Since bicycles seen as a lesser mode of transportation in impoverished communities and represent gentrification, it can be difficult to promote them, though groups like the Major Taylor Group are trying to increase African American ridership. Either way, more racially diverse ride leadership should help diversify rider participation.

Other problems with social cycling rides were identified. It's easy for the ride's somewhat high turnover to give it over to more aggressive cycling, and efforts to rein it in can be paternalistic.

Responses to paid rides were overwhelmingly positive. Of 300 participants, 60% were women, and every ride had a bicyclist that had not ridden at all in the past year. Of survey respondents, 85% loved the ride, 97% would do it again, and 84% were more likely to revisit the participating businesses. No complaints were received of the ride being too fast, and the complaints of 1/3 of the respondents that the ride was too slow were dismissed. As for distance, the longest single ride was 10 miles and the longest single stretch was five miles, but most rides were just a few miles in stretches of two miles or less at a 10-12 mph pace.

The high ratio of leaders to participants of the paid rides helped keep them very well organized. Walkie-talkies were given to the front and back leaders and other riders would circulate through the ride, keeping riders lined up, directing traffic at intersections, and encouraging the ride to behave well in regards to other users. It helped that the Austin Police Department was non-reactionary, so there was no backlash from law enforcement.

Paid rides started with an intro of the leaders and the participants signing of a waiver stating they knew the rules of the road and agreed to follow ride leader instructions.

Marketing was done through their own website, and partnering businesses were encouraged to do their own promotion as well. It was emphasized that time, rather than distance, was mentioned in all promotions. Though a six mile ride would take about 30 minutes, 30 minutes seemed like an easier ride than six miles. Ride classifications were right out; letter-assignments mean nothing to the new riders being targeted.

Hurting businesses were suggested as rich prospects, as a few dozen potential customers can be enticing. Visits to any business should be during slow hours, though, to minimize disruption to regular services and provide customers when the business would be otherwise idle -- restaurants on Saturday afternoons are a good example.

Operating a mobile on-the-go repair clinic through the city and community organizations

Notes

The original facilitator did not show up for this workshop but the intent was fairly self evident by the name of the workshop. It was begun with a go-around and then by asking the question 'who currently operates a mobile repair unit?'

The Bike Cage from Winnipeg told us that they began as a purely mobile shop until they had enough resources and a space to operate from a permanent location. The Bike Root from Calgary told us that the opposite was true for them, they began with a full shop but after losing their space, kept operations going by setting up in various locations on their campus and around town.

To fix or not? Where do you draw the line?

There were various answers to this question, some shops will only fix flats and minor brake and gear issues. Others were willing to fix anything as long as the tools were available. Arguments for the former included

• lack of proper tools
• lack of more advanced tools or replacement parts in case anything went wrong
• lack of knowledge / trust in the knowledge of some casual volunteers that might attend a mobile repair clinic
• some provide more hand on repair for mobile units to decrease liability in case a bike owner injures themselves but providing more complicated repairs ourselves increases liability in case the owner injures themselves on their bike afterwards.

and for the latter:

• We should do our best to get more bikes fixed and on the road
• We're confident in our skills
• The worst thing that might happen is that a bike that wasn't on the road is now still not on the road
• We make bike owners fix their bikes themselves so we are not liable

Other services

In addition to offering minor repairs, the Bike Cage's mobile unit doubles as a bike valet service. There was no elaboration on how the system works.

Getting the message across that a mobile tune tent is not a fully functioning tent

It seemed to be a common problem that when individuals in the community would hear about a free tune-up possibility, they would often bring in bikes that need repairs far beyond what could be done at a tune tent. It was suggested to avoid this, advertise as "light bike repair".

Who holds the tools?

We had a discussion about if the volunteer should fix the bike for the owner or provide the owner with the tools and teach how to fix the bike hands-off. Whether or not tools were handed to the bike owner, teaching at least by the volunteer explaining what he or she was doing seemed to be the norm. The issues behind whether or not to let the owner fix the bike seemed to be liability dependent on both sides. If the volunteer fixes the bike, the shop becomes liable if the bike causes injury down the road while normally the bike owner has not signed a liability waiver to use the tools, so the shop could be liable if they hurt themselves while repairing their bike.

Ride or drive?

We had a discussion on whether or not to drive the equipment to the location or use a trailer. No one seemed to be passionate for either but there are a lot of options out there for trailers big and small. Fargo rides with a huge 4x6 trailer.

Off topic discussion

The conversation went off topic many times but did produce a few interesting ideas:

• Winnipeg uses a punch card, much like one you would find a a coffee shop or fast food location, to punch out skills that a volunteer has learned. Once the card is completely punched the volunteer can start fixing bikes for others.
• While discussing how to get enough replacement parts, another bike shop told us they provide local bike shops with barrels which the shops can use to put parts that are still usable but would otherwise throw away. The barrels would be picked up and emptied at regular intervals. This shop did not have a problem finding parts when needed as a result.

Working Together: Increasing Inter-Organization Collaboration

The intention of this workshop was to talk about all of the ways in which we as bicycle collectives of different sorts who run our services in many different ways, can share our experiences, successes, failures, and tangible output in order to help other collectives both start and continue to thrive.

Notes

Godwin directed this workshop while Bob Wolfe facilitated in providing a speakers list. A large sheet of paper was used to help keep visible notes, at the end of the discussion the notes were the following:

• Current Tools
  • BOOP
  • Bike!Bike!
  • Think Tank
  • Bike Collectives Network
  • Bike Collectives Wiki
  • Various collaborative tools such as our Google Docs list of organizations and Google Maps visualization of orgs across North America

• What we need these tools for
  • Learn how to start a collective
  • Learn how to continue running a collective
  • Find example documents
    • Volunteer Privileges
    • Todo for new volunteers
    • Financials
    • Fliers
    • Curricula
    • Manuals
    • 501c and not-for-profit forms
    • Tool lists
    • Inventory
    • Price guide
    • Mission statement
    • Bylaws
    • Safe space
    • Legal documents
    • Letters for grant writing
  • Find out how other organizations run their various programmes
  • Partner with other organizations

• Brainstorming Ideas which could help
  • A Bike!Bike! Wiki
  • Have more involved wiki moderators who will make suggestions for improvements
  • News feed on wiki
  • Email individuals to improve pages
  • New list-serve other than the Think Tank which can be used for these emails
  • More list-serves for different purposes
  • Online Forums
  • Request documents, pages, and improvements once a year or at other regular intervals
  • Rid the wiki of closed shops
  • RSS feeds on the wiki
  • Separate blog or paper news
  • Paypal donations on BCN or the wiki
  • An umbrella or 'helping hand' organization
  • A seed fund
  • Micro Loans for starting up shops
  • A no-reply list-serve

Key Points

• An 'umbrella' organization goes against many principles that are held by most shops however a 'helping hand' organization that acts as a third party to facilitate to spread of knowledge and possibly funds would likely not.
• To improve the wiki it will take some active moderating and contacting of individuals.
• The wiki is difficult to navigate so it should be reorganized
• Bikecollectives.org is not serving any other purpose other than providing the wiki.
• The Think Tank is too much for many to handle, there are too many emails about things that many don't care about.

Outcome

• Godwin promised to contact the current owners of bikevollectives.org to see if improvements could be made.
• Adding increased moderation of the wiki will be looked into

Contact

• Bike!Bike! website: http://www.bikebike.org
• The Bike Cave's website: http://thebikecave.org
• Email: bikebike2011@gmail.com