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LEASE A BIKE
Need a bike to get around campus?
Click here for lease information and application ...
VOLUNTEER
Would you
like
to volunteer to
help repair, paint, or maintain bikes? Volunteers learn a wide variety of bike maintenance skills and earn access to work on their own bikes. Click here for details.
DONATE A BIKE
We welcome donations of sturdy bikes that are in
good working condition. If you have a bike that you'd like to donate, please
click here for more information. To drop off donated bikes (contact us first
please) here's location information to the MSU Bikes Service Center.
Tim Potter, coordinator of MSU Bikes, is currently serving on the promotional committee of the League of Michigan Bicyclists (more about this here). Thanks in part to this relationship the MSU Bikes Service Center was able to become the host of the 3rd annual Lucinda Mean's Advocacy Day and Parade on May 30, 2007.
Tim is also involved in the local community advocating for better bicycling facilities and advocacy in general whenever possible. Over the winter of 2006-2007 Tim Potter participated in numerous planning meetings for the City of Lansing's Mayoral Task Force on Walking & Bicycling which was formed by Mayor Virg Bernero on October 20, 2006 to improve the facilities in the City of Lansing for bicyclists and pedestrians. Tim is serving on their educational and promotional sub-committee. Here are some links to more information:
- 1st Report – December 1, 2006
- 2nd Report – December 19, 2006
BikeLansing is an email list serve that is a forum for general bike commuting & advocacy questions (best routes, clothing, ride partners...) for the Greater Lansing Area. A number of local bicycle commuting experts are on board and ready to help mentor new commuters and answer questions. To join email jlindenmayer@LMB.org and write SUBSRIBE in the subject line and make sure to include your name in the body of the email.
An excellent online resource for everything healthy in the Greater Lansing area to include bicycling. Check it out and subscribe to their weekly update to stay informed here!
A local community bike advocacy project, operating out of red trailers behind the East Lansing Fire Station No. 1, 1700 Abbott Road. The Program was started in 1994 and has given away hundreds of bikes to needy folks over the years. During the warm months of the year they are open for "business" every Saturday morning from 8 til 11 a.m. During the winter they're open every 2nd Saturday of the month, same time. Here's an old article about the program w/ more info. Email Ron Sprinkel, founder and treasurer for more information, or call him @ 517/351-4848.
On Dec. 9, 2004, the Bike Project hosted 3 temporarily homeless teens (along w/ one counselor) for about 1.5 hrs from the Gateway Community organization. There were 2 boys, 1 girl all about 15-18.
Anyway, they were a little stand-offish at first but by the end we had them truing a wheel and actually enjoying the challenge! We covered general lubrication, chain lubes, gearing issues/ adjustments, brakes (balancing, spring tensioning, replaced some pads, tightened up slop in the anchor and cable adjustments), replaced a tube and tightened up a headset, all on one bike! These kids made comments like "wow, didn't know there was so much to fixing bikes!", "oh, maybe that's why bike does that!", "That's not quite good enough..." when truing the wheel. And none of the kids had worked on bikes at all prior to the session!
It was all-in-all a very fun time, at least for me, and we look forward
to doing it again after the new year. We'd like to schedule at least 1
session per month on an off night, but if anyone else in the Project would
like to host one of these sessions we could maybe offer more to these kids.
We told them that what we had in mind was that if they wanted to volunteer
their time to help fixing up some bikes for a while they could earn themselves
a bike; they seemed pretty excited about that possibility; we'll have to
discuss how many hours, etc. we'd like them to work before they could earn
a bike. Perhaps they could earn a bike that they would have to fix up themselves
from our stock of bikes that are probably going back to surplus? Not
sure, but I do think this is a very good community service that we can offer
in some limited fashion as a way to help the local community outside of
MSU which might make our BP/ CC more attractive to our sponsors.