By Robert Tomlinson
News Director
THREE RIVERS — With the Three Rivers area having a few bicycle trails, as well as specific mentions of bike trails and bike infrastructure called out in the city’s Master Plan, it stands to reason that bicycling is slowly becoming a major pastime in the community.
However, for many years, Three Rivers has not had a dedicated physical store and shop for bicycles, tune-ups, repairs, parts and more, with the closest ones being in Kalamazoo or northern Indiana.
That is, until now.
On Saturday, the Huss Project at 1008 Eighth St. in Three Rivers officially opened up its Community Bike Shop, located on the south side of the old Huss building. The shop offers used children’s and adult bicycles for sale, as well as repair services and tune-ups for bicycles.
The shop has been in the works for a few years, but only recently came to fruition thanks in part to a $50,000 Hometown Grant from T-Mobile that they received last summer.
“It’s been a vision of ours for a long time, and we were excited and surprised to receive the funding that we got from T-Mobile last year,” Rob Vander Giessen-Reitsma of the Huss Project said. “We’ve come a long way, we’ve got a long way to go yet, but it’s to the point where we can utilize the space and make it a contributor to this part of the city and the city as a whole.”
Bicycles for the shop are acquired via donations, with the Huss Project accepting donations of bikes that are in decent condition. So far, there are a couple dozen bicycles available for purchase, with a few dozen more being worked on for selling in the future.
Dan Truesdale, who has been repairing bicycles part-time for over a decade, will manage the shop. He said having a community-led bike shop like this in Three Rivers was “huge” for the city, given the number of people who ride bikes year-round.
“There’s already a good bike culture here,” Truesdale said. He added that there’s a number of benefits to such a bike shop being in the community, including good customer service, higher-quality parts, and a “personal touch” with the work compared to big-box stores like Meijer and Walmart.
“I think a bike shop that’s local in the community offers a different thing those other places can’t offer, which is higher quality parts and actually caring about the customer, and also bringing good bike culture and personality to the thing, where the big stores are extractive and not personal, so a bike shop brings a personal touch,” Truesdale said.
The shop is modeled after similar community bike shops in other areas, such as Goshen, Kalamazoo, and one that Truesdale worked at previously in Montpelier, Vt. The big goal for the shop, Truesdale said, is to help get bikes into the hands of those that want them.
“Because so many bikes exist, and a lot of them get left out in people’s yards to rust or sitting in people’s garage for a long time if they don’t use them, what we’re trying to do is to invite those people to bring those bikes over here, donate if they don’t need them, then we can flip them around and fix them, and then it gets those bikes back on the road,” Truesdale said. “It makes things way more affordable and makes it able for this kind of bike shop to exist.”
Currently, Truesdale said children’s bikes at the shop range in price from $20 to $60, while adult bikes range from $60 to $200. While he said he hasn’t finalized the cost of tune-up and repair services, they are estimated to be $30 to $40 per hour, with Truesdale noting that so far, the majority of tune-ups he’s done have ranged from $20-100 in total cost, based on how much work needs to be done.
And work was what it took to get the shop open in the first place, most of it done over the winter months. The space it is in was once office space for the Huss School back when it was an elementary school. In order to renovate the space, Truesdale said he had to scrape off old glue off the floor, refinish it, and then put insulation in the ceiling, and paint the ceiling and walls. The renovation also involved installing garage doors on the front of the space, which is what most of the T-Mobile grant money was used for.
“That paid for these really nice doors on the front and replacing doors in the hallway over here. We were able to, with that money, hire someone else to do it, because if I had to do it, it would’ve taken me a long time and we might not have been ready in time for the market,” Truesdale said. “We were also able to hire a masonry company to come in and bust out these openings in the wall, and then do structural reinforcement, and then we had another company install the doors. That was a really big project, really dusty, but it really opens up the space and makes it really nice.”
In the near future, Truesdale said the bike shop is planning a pilot program with Three Rivers Area Mentoring to do an “earn-a-bike” program through the organization, which would have kids come and volunteer at the shop to help fix up or take apart bikes, learn skills, and in the process learn to fix up their own bike.
“They’ll be able to take home that bike at the end of the program. So, they’re earning a bike by putting in some work into the shop, and then they can take one home,” Truesdale said.
Overall, both Vander Giessen-Reitsma and Truesdale said they are looking forward to seeing what the shop can become in the future.
“I’m hoping the bike shop can become a community hub for cyclists to meet one another, to support one another both physically with their bikes and becoming a community of belonging,” Vander Giessen-Reitsma said. “It would be lovely if we could build on some of the bike infrastructure our city has begun, there’s a lot of really great stuff in our master plan for cycling infrastructure, and it’d really be great to see some of that come to fruition and make our city a more bike-friendly place.”
“Hopefully, it’ll be a thing that becomes a great community resource that gets bikes into the hands of everyone that wants to ride one in Three Rivers, and then hopefully it turns into a bike shop that can be open a lot of days of the week and be a consistent, awesome thing for creating good bike culture in Three Rivers,” Truesdale said.
The Community Bike Shop is open for its initial run Saturdays until Sept. 27 during the Huss Project’s summer Farmer’s Market, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Truesdale said if there’s enough traffic and interest, there could be extended hours outside of the markets in the future.
Robert Tomlinson can be reached at 279-7488 or robert@wilcoxnewspapers.com.
