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Entries >> Transportation

Bike pirates

by Jamie McLeod
June 10 2007
 
bikeA small storefront on Bathurst St. just south of College St. may be the best place in Toronto to get your bike fixed.They have the tools to do the job, a basement full of spare parts for the taking, and spring tune-up will cost hardly anything. The catch? The folks at Bike Pirates won’t actually fix up your bike for you. They’ll help you and show you how, but they expect you to do it yourself.

“Bike Pirates is a community bike space,” said Theo Merson, one of the core volunteers that run the project. “It exists to be a space that people can access tools and advice on how to use them.”

Bike Pirates started in spring 2006 by a group of hardcore Toronto bikers who were looking for a DIY space to work on their bikes. They previously met at the house of Bill, one of the founders. (Bill has since moved on from Bike Pirates and none of the current volunteers know his last name. Most of the volunteers don’t seem to know each other’s full names. “We’re not really big on surnames here,” said Anthony, one of the core volunteers.)

Bill and some other founding members met up with Alex, who owns the building Bike Pirates is housed in. Alex was looking for “some cool anarchist project to happen in the storefront” and agreed to let Bike Pirates use the space for $200 a month.“Bike Pirates exists largely due to our landlord, Alex,” Merson said.

The scene is based on anarchist principles: there are no leaders, there is no hierarchy, and at the monthly meetings all decisions are made by consensus. “If we don’t all agree, a decision doesn’t get made,” Merson said. “We all have an equal say in what’s going on … it’s a volunteer collective.”

The group enjoys a good relationship with the local bike shops, since whenever they don’t have a part, they head to the shop to buy it. On top of that, some of the core volunteers also work as mechanics at shops in the neighbourhood. “Lots of shops have given us stuff,” Merson said. “The cycling community in T.O. is really tightknit.”

They make sure that at all times they have a supply of $50 bikes, old bikes that people donate, which the volunteers then fix up and sell. If you want something more specific, you can build your own bike for the same price.In the basement there are dozens of old frames, piles of gears, stacks of wheels, and bins of brakes, all in a sort of dimly lit organized chaos. No one will build it for you, but there’s always a volunteer around to show how to attach the stem of the bike to the frame, or tune the brakes.

If you need it, they might even let you get away without paying, like Kevin (again, no last name), whowalked into the storefront on Thursday, May 24. He had just arrived in Toronto from Kamloops.

Kevin said he’d ridden the rails “a five-day shot from Kamloops” sitting in a slightly sheltered well at one end of a grain car. He was planning on taking the train to Montreal for the Anarchist Book Festival that weekend, but while he was in Toronto he was hoping to get a bike so he could get around.

With no money, he agreed to clean up the shop for a few hours, and then leave with the bike he’d picked out. “We’re not going to turn anyone away if they don’t have any money,” Merson said.