Pedals to the people

Last month Ben Hussey, a 26-year-old computer programmer, stowed about 50 bicycle wheels in a crawl space. Hussey is a founding member of Off The Chain, a nonprofit with members who refer to themselves “the collective” and a mission that includes rebuilding discarded bicycles on the cheap, providing inexpensive rides to customers.

The collective hit a bump in the trail this winter, which is the reason Hussey has wheels stowed in a crawlspace. The club has been temporarily displaced from its home at Goose Lake Park, inside the building that houses the Paddle Boat Café, some restrooms and an office used by lifeguards. The city is remodeling that building. Contractors should be finished the first week of June.

“This is frustrating, because the time that we are going to be closed is typically our busiest time of year,” Hussey says.

Teri Peters, the city’s manager for the Northeast Anchorage Parks District, says the city values Off The Chain as a partner. Work on a new user agreement is underway, but a temporary move was inevitable given the construction. “The building is old, and we just really needed to do some electrical work and make some renovations in those bathrooms,” Peters said.  

Some Off The Chain members recently posted a classified ad on Craigslist, fishing for new shop space. They want 800 square feet with a toilet and a safe place for welding, ideally in Midtown. The ad offered “to pay a token, or near-market rate” and expressed interest in a long-term rental.

“I am still interested in that, but I definitely don’t want to forsake what we have. The city gives us a place that’s rent free, and it’s probably worth $400 to $500 per month,” Hussey says.

The club wants to maintain its relationship with city parks. They’ve got insurance. They’ve even met with an attorney. They plan to make sure their next user agreement with the city is solid and understood by both parties. They’ve appointed a city liaison so members won’t be surprised by any future moves parks officials make.

A group that once adopted policies to speak with media only anonymously as “the collective” and to operate with “the minimum level of organization possible,” Off The Chain has grown up a bit. The club—barely four years old this year—is even incorporated. Off The Chain Collective is now known, in the parlance of The Man, as “Off The Chain Bicycle Education Corporation.”

Meantime, members have bicycle frames and crates of sorted parts under tarps in their backyards. One owns a barn. He’s storing bicycle parts there, too.

The club’s volunteer handbook says they accept all donated bicycles and parts that come their way, “regardless of condition.” Hussey’s pretty sure Off The Chain will put the brakes on that policy, at least for time being. “Right now, it is all being stored at private residences,” he says. Receiving more old bicycles could be tough, Hussey says: “It could be really hard to sign somebody up for something like that.”

On Tuesday, Hussey showed off a full-sized shipping container on storage lot at UAA, full of neatly arranged parts. I ask Hussey if there might be a risk in this venture. I point out that many neighborhoods, in Alaska and elsewhere, seem to have one house with hundreds of bicycles piled around it. Sure, every now and then a cleaned-up bike is for sale on the sidewalk in front of that house. But the stream of cleaned-up bikes moving out never seems to dent the pile.

Is there a collector mentality to this? A danger of becoming the crazy cat ladies of the bicycle world?

“That’s kind of all of us,” he says, “and we can all kind of live vicariously through Off The Chain.”

Later he tells me about how people donating bicycles are often impressed by the collective. The club has professional tools. Some members are skilled mechanics, some just learning. They help people tune their own bikes and they run repair clinics. Some members have spent Saturdays repairing bikes and teaching kids at the Mountain View Boys and Girls Club. They claim to have served 200 to 400 people a month last year between repairs, clinics and rebuilt bicycles for sale.

Donated bikes come with trash attached—plastic parts, rotten tires, tattered saddles and worn-out cables—that is bound for the local landfill. But the collective has a re-use/recycle goal that Hussey says they’ve stuck with. Unusable steel and aluminum go to recyclers, but only after a volunteer has stripped and sorted everything. Stripping a bike is a first step in learning how to build one. “These are skills a kid can take into a bike shop anywhere and ask for job,” Hussey says, “Even learning to turn a wrench properly is a skill.”

There is some evidence the collective is more efficient than your typical neighborhood collector. It’s almost certainly tidier.

Inside, pedals and crank arms are neatly sorted in plastic crates. Most impressive is the row of finished bicycles hung handle-bars-up from hooks on one wall. All are on old frames—they look like beaters—but a closer inspection reveals they’ve been cleaned and rebuilt from the wheels to the shifter controls on the handlebars. “It’s about 40 bikes. That’s one winter’s work,” he says.

Hussey shows me four bicycles that got special rebuilds for a university-run loaner program. They’re designed for commuters, with brand-new fat street tires, racks and fenders. There’s a bit of a gray area what entity owns those bikes, Hussey says, but there are 15 total and the student bicycle club and the university manage them. The collective provides maintenance.

The container, too, is on loan from the campus. The parking managers at the university have been strong allies. “They see this as a way to mitigate the parking shortage on campus,” Hussey says.

Off The Chain sprung from the University of Alaska Bicycle Club. The first year the collective formed, they had grand visions of providing free bicycles to Anchorage. Talk like that is common in cycling circles, where slogans such as “One Less Car” underscore a green tinge to cycling, as if we might pedal ourselves out of global warming, traffic jams, and an energy-hungry place in the global economy.

Three summers ago Off The Chain operated a “bike library,” the collective’s name for its free loan program. Hussey says about 80 percent of the loaners were never returned. “Which is good, as far as getting people on a bike, but I know some of those bicycles just ended up in people’s garages, or in streams or rivers,” he says.

The group’s city liaison is Brian Lindamood, who works in the engineering department of Alaska Railroad Corporation. Lindamood says he once held a job as a bike mechanic. He sounded awfully pragmatic on the telephone for man involved in a “collective” out to save the world. “I like to keep my world diversified,” he said when I asked him how he got involved. “Some people look at (bicycles) purely as a form of transportation and some are clearly out to save the world, but in any group you have all different types of people. Maybe I’m just a bit more of a pessimist. I just think it is what it is.”

Lindamood has been involved for about 18 months. He says the club has seen progress behind the scenes in that time. (I’m tempted to ask if the pile of bicycles at his house has shrunk in those months, but the question is moot given the recent scramble to vacate the city’s building.) The club has accomplished paperwork tasks while still getting together to rebuild bicycles. They’ve made decisions, he says. Members show up. “We have about 20 people a week at our meetings,” Lindamood said.

Off The Chain doesn’t seem to have shed their altruism, just adapted to a culture that supports incorporated nonprofits more so than anonymous collectives. And rather than shun the would-be fixers and crazy cat ladies of the bicycle world, Hussey says the group attracts them.

“We meet different kinds of volunteers. Sometimes we get someone who just wants to donate one bicycle and learn to fix it. Other times we meet the guy with 80 bicycles in his backyard who had big plans to fix them up for kids,” he says. “Anchorage still has a lot of those guys.”

scott@anchoragepress.com