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A bicycle cooperative ("bike co-op"), bicycle kitchen, bicycle collective, or community bike shop is an assisted-service bicycle repair shop, usually organized as a volunteer cooperative.
Contents
Bike co-ops assist individuals who are in need of bike repair and maintenance. They often sell new and used bike parts as well as refurbished bikes, and offer formal bike repair and bike assembly classes. Visitors can learn repair skills both for breakdowns on the road and for home repairs. Staff and instructors are normally volunteers.
Shop time
Shop time is considered to be the use of the bike co-op's space and tools. Some bike co-ops charge users a set fee of between US$5 and US$20 per hour. Some bike co-ops will waive the fees for low-income users. Bike Pirates in Toronto is one example of a co-op which uses a pay what you want strategy. They request that each user make a donation.
Co-ops with lower overhead costs are often more relaxed about cost recovery. For example, one co-op inside an Australian "community environment park" existed rent-free until recently. That co-op continued to charge just $8 USD for a one-year membership, including unlimited shop time, even after it began paying rent.
Parts
The cost of new or used parts is usually added to the shop fee, but is typically substantially below retail prices. Some workshops stock new items such as brake pads, inner tubes, and bearings.
Parts may be sourced from public donations. Children's bikes are often donated when they are outgrown, and abandoned bikes are sometimes obtained from police stations, street cleaning firms, or from large institutions such as schools and universities.
Locations
An early bike co-op was the Fahrrad.Selbsthilfe.Werkstatt, founded in 1983 in a formerly squatted factory in Vienna, Austria. Another early co-op was "P'tit vélo dans la tête", founded in Grenoble, France, in 1994.
Later on, some bike co-ops were founded on the west coast of the US. One example is the Bike Kitchen, founded in 2003 in San Francisco.
Bike co-ops can be found worldwide. The Bike Collective Network includes a regionally-sorted list of hundreds of co-ops scattered across a few dozen countries.