RC seniors featured in Ann Arbor News article covering the East Quad Bike Co-op

East Quad Bike Cooperative at U-M collects, repairs, gives away donated bikes

by Tina Reed | The Ann Arbor News

The courtyard of the East Quad residence hall looked like a used car lot for bicycles Saturday.

With 50 or so donated bikes parked and piled up in the grass, it actually was a swap of sorts. The event was organized by a University of Michigan student group to collect used and unwanted bikes from students and local residents.

The idea was to get many of them back on the road by giving them away to students who didn't have bikes.

It was the brainchild of two U-M seniors - Rob Linn and Kostya Bakhurin - who turned their bicycling hobby into a budding student group called the East Quad Bike Cooperative a few years ago. They wanted to promote biking for its environmental sustainability, among other things.

"Kostya and I are both avid cyclists and Ann Arbor has made a lot of moves to be more bike-friendly," said Linn, who's earning a degree in urban planning this May. "We've both been in cities that have a great bicycling culture like New York or Portland, and it made us jealous."

The idea took off when the students took over a basement lounge of the East Quad, replacing couches with old bike frames and file cabinets stuffed full of bike brakes and chains, to create a repair workshop. They began fixing up the bikes they could and taking parts from the bikes they couldn't and teaching bike repair tricks to anyone that stopped by.

On Saturday, students wandered through, many quite by accident, to kick the tires and examine the collection of mountain and road bikes that had piled up by early afternoon.

One woman - dressed with bright blue sunglasses and a purple scarf - found a violet bike and had Linn change the tire before she left. Another student, Timothy Alford, stumbled upon the bikes with some friends who were participating in a race that very day. He quickly picked a black mountain bike when he heard they were up for grabs.

But bike or no bike, he'd be getting a car the moment he could have one, he said.

That's fine by Linn.

He's built up plenty of bikes for former housemates when they couldn't have a car. Those friends ended up keeping the habit of using the bike, he said. Creating that inclination toward using bikes more often is the point.

Posted on 13 Apr 09 by Ann Brennan