Bike Co-Op Is Bringing Back Olde Reed

Play the horns and celebrate in the Quad! The Reed College Bike Co-op is open for business again after three years off. The Bike Co-op offers a space and tools for students to repair their own bikes and a community of knowledgeable student bike enthusiasts to help others. The Co-op is located in the basement of ODB and is a place for bike lovers of Portland to join together in a community around all things bikes. Current manager Logan Warren ‘28 has dedicated himself over the past year to repairing the Bike Co-op, which he says is “cooperative.”

The Co-op is open to anyone, so inexperienced repairers are welcome to join and learn. Warren is always on hand to help with any repair needs involved. The Co-op will also pay you to buy a bike. They offer a $100 stipend for first time buyers of bikes, and a $50 stipend for any purchases after that.

To access the Bike Co-op, students need to register with the Co-op to gain access to the ODB basement, which you can do through emailing the bike co-op at bikecoop@reed.edu. After they are registered into the Bike Co-op, students are free to use it whenever they please. The tools are used according to the honor system because it is a co-op. If people need help with their bikes, they are free to email Warren or people already in the co-op.

At the beginning of last year, the Co-op was in disrepair. Warren’s mission was to rebuild the Bike Co-op. “Aside from the physical mess, a lot of institutional memory was lost,” he says. Since it was abandoned, a lot of the knowledge and expertise that is needed to run the Bike Co-op was lost, creating a loss of institutional memory for the whole organization. The loss of institutional memory was a tough obstacle to overcome, because of the fact that there were no guidelines and little evidence of what the responsibilities of the Co-op once were. However, this leaves student leaders such as Warren an opportunity to build their organization into something new. As for Warren, he has a lot of ideas.

Warren’s goals for the Bike Co-op are ambitious. He envisions the Co-op as a place for “likeminded people or people with a curiosity to learn.” It will also be a place for the cyclists of Reed to hang out, share advice about repairs, and build bikes. Depending on the success of these ventures, Warren would also like to organize events, such as group rides, so that people can get together. Warren would also like to bring back the stipend system as described before.

All of this costs money. Which leads to the question, how is the Bike Co-op funded? The answer: through Funding Hell. That means that the Bike Co-op needs you!

For those not yet convinced to join the Bike Co-op, Warren offers one more incentive: bike jousting. In years past (Olde Reed), people have historically ridden around on engineered tall bikes and jousted with each other. Warren is planning to bring this tradition back. “I have one tall bike in the co-op,” he says, “the goal is jousting, I just need a welder.”