First published in print.
Give a man a bicycle and he’ll ride for a day; teach a man to repair a bike and he’ll ride around Austin for a lifetime.
Located on the first floor of the 27th street garage near Kinsolving Dormitory, lies a hidden gem that has been on campus for about a decade. Orange Bike Project is an entirely student-run organization that repairs student bicycles for free in addition to renting bikes out for extremely low rates.
“It’s definitely a lot cheaper to come here than to go to a bike shop. I know back home where I’m from, El Paso, they’ll charge you like $80 for fairly simple repairs,” says McTzviel Oyerinde, a freshman aerospace engineering major at the University of Texas at Austin. At several other bike repair shops surrounding the UT campus, a simple brake pad replacement can cost up to $10, while Orange Bike Project (OBP) will provide the pads and show you how to quickly fit them onto your bike for free.
Oyerinde discovered Orange Bike Project while googling nearby bike repair shops to fix his well worn bike of ten years. “I initially didn’t know anything about bikes,” recounted Oyerinde. After volunteers at OBP showed him how to make the repairs, he frequently came back to the garage to tune up his bicycle and even undertook a project repairing his friend’s damaged bicycle. “I ended up really liking it and kept coming back next semester as a volunteer.” As a volunteer, Oyerinde continues to learn from problems as he encounters them, and then passes on his knowledge to students coming in with damaged bikes. “The idea here is that we don’t really just fix your bike,” says Oyerinde, “we teach you how to fix your bike and then you start doing the adjustments yourself.”
Orange Bike Project was modeled after Austin’s Yellow Bike Project, a non-profit organization that hopes to get more bicycles on the streets of Austin by teaching bike mechanics and maintenance and running community bike shops.
Orange Bike Project is creating a community of students willing to learn a new skill to keep the wheels turning in Austin, one bike at a time.
Orange Bike Project is open M-F from 4:00-7:00pm.
