BikeAthens: One kid’s trash is another kid’s tricycle
November 9, 2009 by BRIANA GERDEMAN
Filed under Variety
From basements, landfills and police impounds, the forgotten bikes of Athens are getting a new start at BikeAthens’ Bicycle Recycling Program.
The Bicycle Recycling Program, or BRP, repairs used bikes and donates them to children and homeless shelters. The program was started in 2001 and is currently located in the Chase Street Warehouses.
“At first it was in someone’s back yard and garage, and from there to someone’s basement,” said Mike Ely, a co-manager of the BRP. “And then to a storage unit, and then we finally got this space around three years ago. It’s just continually grown.”
Over its eight years, the BRP has repaired 465 bikes.
“We’ve done more bikes every year,” Ely said. “We’re on track to do about 100 bikes this year, and donate 60 to the homeless shelter, and then about 40 to 50 kids’ bikes at Christmas time.”
The program receives most of its bikes from the University police and Athens-Clarke County police, along with some donations from individuals and bikes salvaged from landfills.
“A lot of them come from the police impound,” said Jason Perry, the BRP’s other co-manager. “They’re bikes that are left over from accidents, where a person may have been injured and decided they didn’t want to come back for the bike.[Or] when a case is closed, if a bike happened to have been involved in that case somehow, in a robbery, or someone just happened to be arrested because there was a warrant out for them and they were on a bike, the bike gets put in the impound. If they don’t come back and claim it after a certain period of time, they have to do something with it.”
The volunteers of the BRP clean the donated bikes, assess their condition according to an 80-item checklist and make any necessary repairs.
“In the best case, we’re just kind of doing a tune-up like you would on your own bike, taking it to a bike shop,” Perry said. “Make sure the cables are tightened appropriately, make sure it shifts to all gears, pump up the tires, give it a thorough check and everything is OK.”
But he admits that scenario is rare.
“Most of the time, it’s somewhere in the middle, where pretty much everything on the bike needs to be readjusted and relubricated and cleaned,” he said. “And then when it gets to an extreme case, where it appears that there’s just so much work that needs to be done on the bike that we can’t repair it in a reasonable amount of time, we’ll call it a scrap bike and we’ll harvest the usable parts off of it and save them for another bike that will need them.”
After the BRP is done with them, the repaired bikes are in almost new condition.
“Normally when the bikes go out, they’re operating as good as new, for the most part, even though they’re obviously used bikes,” Ely said.
The BRP then donates the bikes to nonprofit organizations, primarily the Athens Area Homeless Shelter’s Job TREC program and Athens’ DUI Drug Court. Kids’ bikes go to Fowler Elementary, where they are given to children as Christmas presents, or to the Athens Area Homeless Shelter.
“They have a program called JobTREC, and it’s a job placement program that they have for people who are in the shelter,” Perry said. “And the bikes are a way for people to get a job, because often to get a job, you have to have proof of transportation. Sometimes jobs require that. And once you have the job, you need to get to it, so people who can’t afford to have a car or take the bus or take a taxi or however it is that they can get to work, they really appreciate having a bike, because it’s a really cheap, reasonably easy way to get around town.”
The BRP volunteers usually let social service workers decide who gets the bikes and do not meet the recipients.
But Perry once met a bike recipient who needed to pick up his bike in a hurry.
“I’ve been here when a person needed to come get one because he was starting a job the next day and he really needed it, so we arranged for him to come here so he could pick up the bike,” he said. “He was really, really happy to have a bike, because he said it would have been like a 45-minute walk otherwise.”
Perry rides a bike to work and said he can appreciate the difficulties of getting around without a car.
“I don’t want to pontificate too much, but people who have cars to get to work sometimes don’t think about riding around Athens as a form of transportation,” he said. “They look at it more as recreation. But if your perspective is from being on your own two feet, if you don’t have a car, having a bike is a really great way to get around.”
Adam Lawrence, a volunteer at the BRP, moved to Athens a month ago to attend training classes at the Navy Supply Corps School, and said the BRP has been a good way to meet people and get involved with a good cause.
“I like the fact that these bikes are going usually to underprivileged people,” he said. “They’re not just going to anyone.”
Perry and Ely encouraged anyone to volunteer at the BRP, regardless of experience. “We have people who come who have no idea how to work on a bike, and some people who don’t even ride bikes, they’re just interested in trying it out,” Perry said. “And we look at that all as components of our overall mission, empowering people who wouldn’t otherwise try it to work on bikes, to get a bike working that wasn’t working before, and become interested in bikes as a mode of transportation.”
