Local 'kitchen' serves up bike help

After crashing his bicycle during a tour through Santa Cruz a couple of years ago, Cal Poly environmental engineering junior Brant Haflich found a bike church that helped him fix and learn about his mode of transportation so he could get back on the road.

Haflich was so impressed with his experience, he found himself asking why San Luis Obispo didn’t have a similar organization.

In order to remedy what he considered San Luis Obispo’s lack of bike help, Haflich, along with Cal Poly graduate Brian Kurotsuchi and friend Kylie Mendonca started the SLO Bike Kitchen six months ago. They saw it as a way to help community members learn about their bikes and how to fix and maintain them.

Haflich and Kurotsuchi both loved bikes and talked about them regularly at the coffee shop that Kurotsuchi worked at. Soon,they started talking about the idea of bringing a bike kitchen to San Luis Obispo.

Now that it is up and running, the bike kitchen is a place where bicyclists can meet to share advice and tools for a low cost.

The idea of a bike kitchen is not new; there are similar organizations in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Santa Cruz. They are known as kitchens, churches or co-ops and they offer a variety of services. Some operate like regular bicycle shops and sell brand new parts.

“(The bike kitchen is) supposed to be a community resource center for people to work on their bikes,” Kurotsuchi said. “You can’t go to a bike shop and do that.”

“The important thing about the SLO Bike Kitchen is that we’re not trying to compete with SLO bike shops,” Kurotsuchi said.

Instead, the kitchen uses donated parts and tools, and focuses mainly on educating the people who come to their workshops instead of selling new parts to make a profit.

“Most people don’t know how to fix their bike,” Kurotsuchi said. “Now they have people there to help them.”

While Cal Poly offers a similar resource for student bicyclists, the bike kitchen members wanted to start an organization that was not affiliated with the campus. Many people don’t know it’s there or they don’t want to go because they feel it’s oriented toward students, Haflich said. The members wanted to create an organization that didn’t have the barriers of a university-affiliated program.

Besides its daily operations, the SLO Bike Kitchen holds periodic workshops to teach people how to care for their bikes, and also offers advice for bicycle safety.

One of their most successful programs has been Women’s Night, where female mechanics helped fix the bikes brought in.

“(Women) could get away from the dude (stereotype) of mechanics,” Haflich said. “It didn’t feel like the guys were overpowering the girls.”

Crop science senior Isaac Miller said he met Haflich a year ago at a bike swap meet where Haflich and Mendonca had a booth set up and has since visited the bike kitchen.

“I really like the idea that it’s a place that doesn’t cost money,” Miller said. “You can hang out and learn; it’s been a great experience.”

Miller also helps out at workshops by teaching. “I helped a friend fix up her bike and now I see her ride it around all the time,” he said.

Kurotsuchi said that the bike kitchen has ties with all the bike shops in the area, where they place buckets for bicycle parts that the shops want to throw out. The kitchen then lets people who go to the workshops dig through the buckets to find parts they need for their bike. If parts cannot be used anymore, the kitchen donates them to be used as art.

“We try to be a standard for environmental responsibility in terms of bikes,” Kurotsuchi said.

SLO Bike Kitchen is currently searching for a permanent home and the members are pursuing non-profit status. They rely solely on donations and a few sponsorships by local bike shops like Art’s Cyclery. They also would like to operate seven days a week and hold more regular workshops, as well as get involved with other community programs such as a bike loaner program, Kurotsuchi said.

“We’ve gotten a very positive response (from the community),” Haflich said. “People are surprised they can come and do things for free. They really gain empowerment from being able to do things themselves.”