Photos: Minneapolis/St Paul Bike Co-ops and shops

I went to Minnesota at the beginning of August for a wedding.  While I was there I visited a few of the local bike co-ops and shops in the Twin Cities (photo set.)  It turns out that Minneapolis/St Paul has a thriving bike culture, which I would have anticipated if I had noted that Minneapolis is typically considered the 2nd most bike friendly city in the United States (when their neighbor is tear gassing protesters.)

Visiting was educational.  I visited and talked to people at three separate bike . . . entities.  The first was The Hub, a standard worker owned cooperative.  The second place was One On One, a coffee shop, bike shop, and bike themed art gallery rolled into one.  Their basement had a ridiculous number of bikes.  And last, I visited the Sibley Bike Depot, a bike repair collective just like the Bikerowave, Bike Kitchen or the Bike Oven.

The Sibley Bike Depot is half a decade older than LA’s Bike Kitchen, and one of the people who has been involved from the beginning answered my deluge of questions about their history.  It seems as if Sibley recently turned a corner, and they did so partly when they lost the paid staff and went fully volunteer.  They also are intimately connected with one of the major bike policy advocacy organizations in the area.  The history of that relationship was instructive  – LA’s secret dramas in the realm of bike activism are, it seems, fairly typical.

This visit confirmed for me is how different each cities obstacles to bike friendliness are.  When I visited Detroit last winter (I grew up nearby in Ann Arbor), I learned that the City of Detroit, a city of just under a million, has only two retail bike shops.  We must have ten times that many for the same number of people in West LA.  The activists there were working hard to get a new retail bike shop established, because that would facilitate bicycle use.  We would laugh at such an effort for LA, but for Detroit that is shrewd and appropriate activism.  In both Minneapolis/St Paul and Detroit, I found organizations without a lot of revenue in huge spaces.  But rents are affordable there, especially in slightly blighted areas.  For bike activists in LA, finding affordable real estate for our projects is a gigantic obstacle.  There, it wasn’t a big deal.

Each city faces surprisingly different obstacles.  Remember that when you talk to people about cycling – each person is likely to face surprisingly different obstacles to becoming a cyclist, and they’re likely to see benefits in different ways.

Check out some of the photos!

Check out the detail on the wheel cover on this bike:

Bike racks at the Weisman Museum:

The basement of One on One:

A moose:

My mom and I at The Hub:

A mural at The Hub:

This isn’t in the Flickr set, but this is the Mosaic of the Americas, on The Resource Center of the Americas, across the street from The Hub:

Ashira might like this:

This messed up over exposure worked nicely:

This is true: