Free Rider
By Josh Fitzwater |
|
As you relish in the last few sips of your morning Pike Place roast coffee, you run through your mental checklist one last time before heading out the door of your Short North apartment to go and get your day on. Okay, lets see here, you need to replenish your barren refrigerator, buy a few LPs at Magnolia Thunderpussy, and pick up some carryout from Nida's to keep the hunger gods at bay. But, before you do all that, head over to Milk Bar and kill two birds with one stone: check on the sale price of the 3Sixteen double breasted trench you've been eyeballing for the past few weeks, and more importantly, borrow one of their community bicycles for a few hours to run all of your aforementioned errands.
The entrepreneurial blood that has been breathing revitalizing life into the Short North has added a new badge to their community sash: the neighborhood bike-share cooperative, EveryoneBikes.
Now conscientious small businesses including Milk Bar, Sandbox, Ladybird, Undone, Vino 100, Tigertree, What the Rock?!, the Segway store, and more all have bicycles at their individual shops for you to borrow - for FREE.
EveryoneBikes bike at Milk Bar
Photo: Patrick Mizenko
Their vision, EveryoneBikes, is a display of the cooperative spirit that resides in a partnership between businesses that truly care about the community they are a part of. Think of it like checking out a book from the library, only instead of ink and papyrus, you get wheels and gears. The bicycle model chosen for the co-op effort is the Africa Bike by Kona. Not only are these bikes durable, comfortable, and functional - sporting a sturdy wire basket to hold your precious cargo - they also support a worthy cause, with a bike being donated to an aide worker in Africa for every bike purchased.
"With our bike-share, people are able to go into participating stores and rent a bike for two hours at a time. They are then free to take care of whatever they need to do," says Kareem Jackson, co-owner of Milk Bar.
"We believe the bike-share will help promote all the businesses in the Short North. There is a lot more here than just a few blocks and having accessible bikes will encourage people to explore and cut back on crowded parking lots."
EveryoneBikes officially kicked off in August of this year, but with the impending winter that is already setting in on Ohio, the bike-share will have its official grand reopening in early spring of 2010.
As Columbus bigwigs like Mayor Coleman have already shown their support for the worthy cause, it seems only a matter of time before the bike-share partnership becomes an environmentally friendly success. And hey, think of the bike-share as a good start to helping shed the 18 pounds you put on over the winter from eating too many Scottish Eggs at Mac's Pub.
Visit www.everyonebikes.org for more information.
Originally Published: November 1, 2009
