“Fix or fix not. … There is no try.”
Taped on an interior door inside the Green Bikes Shop is the North Star of a student-run program doing its part to increase bicycle usage among students at The Claremont Colleges as Pomona strives to become a sustainable campus.
It’s a quarter past 4 on a recent Wednesday afternoon, and the shop is open for service.
“This year we’ve been so efficient,” says Lee Mugweru ’28, one of two shop managers. “We had bikes loaned out the first week of the semester—one of our fastest rollouts. And right now, we have a problem we’ve never had.”
“We have too many bikes ready and not enough people coming to get them.”
Growing up in Kenya, Mugweru knew two pastimes: soccer and riding bikes. He and his friends learned how to do the latter by going to the forest and flying downhill with three, sometimes four, others hanging onto the bike for dear life.
“It was so dangerous,” he says. “It was so fun.”
Mugweru got his own bike while in boarding school, but a local mechanic whom he paid to repair it sold it instead. “I didn’t want to deal with something like that again,” he says. “I wanted to learn how to repair bikes myself.”
A fellow Kenyan student told Mugweru about the Green Bikes Shop last year and Mugweru got a job as a mechanic. He says his managers were exceedingly patient and supportive as he learned his way around the shop.
“Fixing bikes is a constant learning process,” Mugweru says. “Even now, I’m met with new challenges.”
One-stop shop
The Green Bikes Shop is hidden in plain sight, accessible only by a ramped entrance on Sixth Street opposite Merritt Field. The basement of Norton-Clark III is easy to miss, until you’ve got a flat tire or broken chain.
Inside, green floor tiles lay below rows of Schwinns, Bridgestones and Magnas marked “READY!” for distribution. Dozens of bare wheels hang from an overhead rack. A pegboard holstering dozens of tools rests on a workbench.
Another displays tires, handlebar grips, horns.
The Associated Students of Pomona College (ASPC) provides the Green Bikes Shop a budget for parts, and the shop offers replacement parts for personal bikes at discounted rates.
There is no charge if used parts can be repurposed.
Student wages are covered by the Sustainability Office, and Nikhil Schneider, assistant director of sustainability, hires mechanics with backgrounds as diverse as the two-wheelers that come through the shop during the year.
“Usually, the folks with stronger foundations [in bikes] are more likely to be hired,” Schneider says. “But we also look at how interested they are in nurturing a community of cyclists on campus.”
The shop maintains a rental fleet of about 100 bikes, Schneider says. Most were either donated by graduating seniors, staff and faculty or abandoned on campus during seasonal breaks, collected and never claimed.
“Nobody’s doing a 50-mile ride on these bikes,” Schneider says. “But they’ll get you around campus in less than 10 minutes.”
Rentals are always free.
‘I really love it’
The Green Bikes Shop is as much a learning space as the labs and classrooms in Carnegie, Estella or Pearsons.
Mugweru didn’t even know where the shop was last year before applying to be a mechanic.
“But I knew fixing bikes would be a great skill to learn to become self-reliant,” he says.
While the shop employs as many as eight mechanics from across The Claremont Colleges, turnover is frequent, Schneider says, as student workers graduate, leave to study abroad or take other jobs on campus.
As manager, Mugweru delegates duties to his repairmen and tackles his own workload.
“I really love it,” he says. “I want to do it until I graduate.”
While not as profound as other sustainability efforts at Pomona, Schneider says Green Bikes’ impact is reflected in campus culture.
“We are producing graduates who have a better sense of what it’s like to live in a community that is reasonably bikeable,” Schneider says. “A lot of Pomona College students haven’t really been exposed to what you can do in a town like Claremont, where there’s so much you can access within 15 minutes on a bike.”
“The impact of Green Bikes,” he adds, “is showing students the type of independence bicycling can create.”
The Green Bikes Shop is open from 4:15 to 7:45 p.m. Monday through Thursday and 10 a.m. to noon and 4 to 6 p.m. on Friday. For information, email greenbikes@pomona.edu.