The Yellow Bike Project in Austin has been up and running since 1997, allowing community members to participate in bicycle repairs, to learn about bicycle maintenance and to be able build bicycles if they can’t afford or don’t want to buy one.
A group at Texas A&M wants to build a shop on campus similar to the Yellow Bike shops so that students, staff and faculty can get involved in local bicycle projects. A campus bike shop would be maintained by volunteers and stocked with a pool of donated bicycles and parts, said the project’s organizers. The Maroon Bike Project is only in preliminary stages – grant proposals are being written and plans for a campus space are being made, but physics graduate student Lucas Naveira is excited about the possibilities.
“The Maroon Bike Project is a combination of ideas from the Yellow Bike Project and our own ideas,” Naveira said. “People can come in not knowing anything about bikes, and two weeks later they’ve built one and they know how to maintain it.”
The ideas behind the project – to increase bicycle ridership on campus and to educate the campus’ bicycle riders – are not being taken lightly by the Maroon Bike Project. Lack of maintainance knowledge and a lack of money prevents people from fixing their bikes, said Annie Behrman, a senior anthropology major and organizer of the project.
“I saw a guy riding his bike on campus the other day and his entire back wheel fell off, totally screwing up his frame and making him fall,” Behrman said. “People are usually completely unaware of the problems with their bike, and we want to change that.”
Behrman, Naveira and Mitch Drennan, a senior biology major, are working with various University departments in order to get funding, supplies and an on-campus location. They hope to make use of the unclaimed bicycles collected by Transportation Services at the end of each school year, and they’ve gotten some help from A&M’s Department of Recreation, Parks and Tourism Sciences. However, they’re still a long way away from getting a working volunteer bicycle shop on campus.