Nick Kristof celebrates its ability to get more kids in school in Zimbabwe:
When I asked Abel what he dreamed of, he said “a bicycle” — so that he could cut the six hours he spent walking to and from school and, thus, take better care of the younger orphans. Last week, Abel got his wish. A Chicago-based aid organization, World Bicycle Relief, distributed 200 bicycles to students in Abel’s area who need them to get to school. One went to Abel.
That’s the first of a planned 20,000 bicycles this year. World Bicycle Relief has given out more than 70,000 bicycles so far. It also trains one mechanic for every 50 bicycles distributed and provides basic spare parts and tools in order to keep the bikes going and create small businesses.
World Bicycle Relief is the brainchild of a Chicago bike parts executive. Another bicycle initiative, Zambikes, is the project of two California men and two Zambians. Their goal is to help the poor African country by putting Zambian bikes on American roads. Their bike — a bamboosero — is a bicycle with a bamboo frame:
“Bamboo is so great for bikes because when you’re going on long rides and the terrain is tough, bamboo has shown that it’s a shock absorber so you actually have a smoother ride,” said Spethmann. “And it doesn’t cost a lot in Zambia, it grows like crazy. Zambia is a country that imports from the developed world like crazy, so to send something out that is Zambian-made of Zambian materials is a huge thing for Zambia as a whole.”
Zambikes co-founder Mwewa Chikamba looks at the orders coming in through the company’s website. It seems customers in the US and elsewhere aren’t put off by a price tag of nearly $500 dollars for a bamboo frame and $900 for a completed bike.
“People buying the bamboo bikes are excited,” said Chikamba. “They’re getting something from a third-world country going into the first world. And secondly, they’re getting something grown naturally, you don’t have to get all this steel. We are using the returns to train the unskilled labor force we have.”
Zambikes has a trained staff of 45 and offers interest-free loans for Zambians to buy bikes and set up businesses of their own.
But if you’d rather build your bamboo bike yourself, check out The Bamboo Bike Studio in Brooklyn. NPR did a story last winter about them:
On a recent weekend, Sari Harris — a self-described “tinkerer” — spent close to $1,000 to make her own bamboo bike. For that fee, she got the bamboo frame and all of the components she needed to make a multi-gear or single-speed bike — and a bamboo bike expert to guide her through the assembly process. … Engineer Marty Odlin was supervising Harris’ work. Odlin estimates that there are now close to 80 bamboo bikes on the road that were built in his Brooklyn studio.
“Everyone who leaves the studio says, ‘Wow, my bike is my favorite object now.’ ” Odlin says. “They have such a connection to this thing that came together under their own hands. They may not come here to have that connection to their bicycle, but that’s what they leave with.”
The Brooklyn studio also had a visit from the Canadian radio program, Spark.
And while on the topic of bikes, Andrew Sullivan pointed, twice, to reaction, pro and con, to Felix Salmon’s Unified Theory of New York Biking. I’m squarely in the con camp:
Salmon makes many excellent points, but I was dismayed to see he fell into the same trap (or, in his case, net) as most other people who try to address this issue, which is to suppose that drivers and cyclists and pedestrians are somehow “different,” or that their nature is somehow determined by their vehicle. Excluding for the moment the fact that many people are pedestrians and cyclists and drivers at various points in the day, a considerate person is a considerate person and an idiot is an idiot, and both will behave as such regardless of how they are propelling themselves at any given moment. “People are People,” sang some awful 80s band, and saying drivers rarely break the rules but cyclists always do is like saying poor people commit crime all the time but rich people rarely do. Of course rich people are criminals too–they just rob you differently.