May is National Bike Month and to celebrate, ORA’s Forward Motion, has tapped Quad City bike lover, bike advocate and most recent college graduate, Gabriel Lareau, 22, who has returned home to Moline for the summer before joining the Peace Corps to share his passion for cycling. The Quad Cities is not only known for it’s miles of bike and walking trails, but for its legions of cycling fans who embrace cycling as a hobby, a means to get fit, and provide an earth-friendly mode of transportation.
In April of last year, my roommate, Brayden, needed a new bike. His old one suffered a familiar fate—rusted up, unused, sitting in the garage until (suddenly!) it was time for a ride and it rode only a few miles until going kaput. With his old steed beyond repair and unable to buy a shiny new one, there was only one place to turn: the Iowa City Bike Library.
To get there, we had to sit out a near-tornado under an overpass, but we finally made it to the Bike Library after four hours of driving.
It was closed, of course. Despite our generation supposedly being the most tech-savvy in human history, we hadn’t bothered to look up the Library’s hours online. After a few despondent breaths, I recollected myself.
“Hold on, I’m from the Quad Cities,” I reminded myself. “This is my home turf.” Gabriel, you’re not only in the heart of ‘Iowa Nice’ but in the Midwest—you’re never more than a few blocks away from someone who’s willing to fix your flat tire, carry your groceries to your car or, say, unlock this giant bike garage for you. You can do this.”
Feeling determined, I called up a friend who volunteers at the Bike Library to see if there was anyone who could let me in. He gave me the phone number for Audrey Wiedemeier, the Iowa City Bike Library’s Director.
I called her, praying that, for some reason, she would answer an unknown number on a Saturday morning. Miraculously, she picked up. I told her our situation.
“I’m on my way,” Widemeier said.
Answering cold calls notwithstanding, the Iowa City Bike Library is still a unique gem with a simple mission: to get more people moving by “getting more people on bikes.”
Located less than an hour’s drive (or a day’s worth of cycling) from the Quad Cities, it’s a Swiss Army Knife combination of bike shop, community center, and classroom. Collaboration is embedded in the Bike Library’s oral history—nobody likes mentioning one specific founder.
“For the first twelve years that the library was around, it was just run by a steering committee solely made up of volunteers,” Wiedemeier told me. “This year is our 20th anniversary.”
In those twenty years, the Bike Library has combined sustainability with education and Iowa Nice with good ol’ fashioned Midwestern hard work. That their formula seems to work is understatement. “We’ve hired more staff and grown our volunteer base,” Wiedemeier said.
At the Bike Library, there aren’t any new bikes for sale. Every bicycle and bicycle part that hangs from the Library’s walls, is packed onto its floorspace, or is chaotically organized into sharpie-labeled boxes are all donated from the community.
From there, the Library’s volunteers assemble and adjust what many would regard as trash into unequivocal treasures, ready to get people on the road and moving.
Or, if you’re not looking for a new bike and instead want your bike fixed, be prepared to roll up your sleeves. The volunteers at the Bike Library won’t fix it for you, but they’ll teach you how.
“We try to spend as much time as we can on each person and ask them questions to try and figure out what they want to do on their bike and how we can help them do it,” Wiedemeier said. “A lot of people walk away being like, ‘Wow, thank you so much. I feel like I can ask the stupid questions here that I haven’t been able ask at other bike shops.’”
The Library isn’t just for adults either. Recently, the Bike Library has been doing what McDonald’s realized decades ago, but for the opposite effect. Instead of instilling bad habits early by coupling toys with fries, the Bike Library couples kids with bikes to get them moving from an early age.
Not only do they have a wide variety of kids bikes in their inventory—which I showed Brayden to first and subsequently received some well-deserved jeers—but the Bike Library emphasizes basic bicycle safety education. Unfortunately, in our car-centered streets, there are dangers associated with our beloved transportation mode less traveled.
“We have a kids club where we teach them how to ride and use bike infrastructure,” Wiedemeier said. “And I always tell them that they always have to be look everybody driving in the eyeballs. If you can’t see their eyeballs, they can’t see you.”
That’s just one of the tips I’ve told Brayden, now that we’ve been able to ride more together: me on my tried, RAGBRAI-tested Fuji, and Brayden on his Bike Library-assembled steed which he rides everywhere, rain or shine.
He loves that thing. So much so that he even wrote about it in a blog of his own, “To say this bike has changed my life is an understatement. This bike has become a part of me.”
