Olympia Bike Newsby Palu Kingston I was thinking about how I could tie in the Olympia Community Bike program (OCB) with the transportation theme of this issue of the Green Pages. Then I realized that an article about OCB is, by default, transportation-related. With that in mind, here's my submission. I am writing this article to give a general overview of the state of the Olympia Community Bike program. For those of you who don't know about us, we are a nonprofit organization whose mission is to provide the Olympia community with a free transportation alternative in the downtown core. This takes the form of the free-to-use pink bikes. We kicked off our second season by releasing 30 new pink bikes at the Procession of the Species parade in April. Since then, we have been maintaining them every Sunday at our work space. It has been difficult keeping up with all the injured bikes that come in, but we've been managing to fix about 4-5 bikes at the end of each Sunday. This rate of 4-5 bikes a week is just enough to keep thirty healthy bikes on the street. But our original objective at the beginning of this year was to have ninety pink bikes available for the community to use by the end of the summer. We haven't produced any new pink bikes since our initial release this spring, so, as you might imagine, I'm a little worried. This sounds a little depressing, but there are two new hopes. The first one we call the "SuperWheel." A SuperWheel consists of an airless tire which is put on a single-speed, coaster brake wheel, made with the equivalent of 13 or 14 gauge spokes (very, very thick and sturdy). Why all this? Well, as head wrencher, I see lots of pink bikes in need of repair. What I have noticed is that nine out of ten bikes in need of repair have flat tires. The flat tires are often accompanied by ruined rims from riding with no air in the tires - hence the airless tire and the extra sturdy wheel. To drive my point home, I often see taco-ed wheels (bent like a taco shell), which happens as a result of hopping curbs and whatever else you can think of. If you want to do this, get a BMX bike! The second hope is the use of tire-liners. A tire liner is a strip of very hard rubber/plastic stuff which is placed between the inner tube and the tire - it provides a formidable barrier against glass and other sharp objects. We will be using the SuperWheels as a rear wheel replacement for a specific number of bikes. For the front wheel of bikes with SuperWheels, and front and back wheels of normal bikes, we will use the tire liners. I am confident that these improvements in YOUR pink bikes will help enable us to get those extra sixty bikes out there, thus making the pink bikes more of a practical transportation alternative. Palu Kingston is the Head Wrencher of Olympia Community Bikes.
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