Saturday's ride is CANCELED!

Bad news. The bike ride to St. George for tomorrow and Sunday has been canceled. We will be rescheduling for July. If you have a preference for dates let me know this week. On the bright side, this might give us enough time to make T-shirts!

NEW BIKES POSTED

Just a heads up that there are new bikes posted on the GBP store. They tend toward smaller mountain bikes and BMX at the moment but there is a smattering of everything up there.

Save the Bikes Road Tour 2009

If you've kept up with our blog, you've certainly heard about our big bike ride on the 13th. We will be taking the scenic route from the St. Marks Trailhead all the way to St. George Island State Park. That's about a 160 mile round trip over two days. If you've never gone that far, don't worry. Almost all the trip is on flat ground and we will be breaking the trip into four, forty mile rides. The current plan is to camp out in the primitive "youth camp" in the park and to have a cookout on the beach on Saturday night. The best part is, the entire trip is just $25 including all the park fees, a follow car, and dinner on the beach!

Here's the link.

Missing Pictures and May Sale

Hi everyone,

If you've been wondering where the promised pictures of the new bikes are, you're not alone. I've run into some problems with downloading pictures from my Iphone onto my laptop. I have descriptions all ready for the bikes, but without pictures, they're not nearly as funny (assuming they were funny in the first place, which I doubt).

In better news, we will be marking down several of the bikes that have been around for a while just in time for you to take advantage of the last day of the 10% off May sale. There will be several BMX bikes as well as one or two mountain bikes discounted between 10 and 25%! We've also been finishing up some hybrid bikes as well as a few mountain bikes that should be ready sometime Saturday. This is all on top of whatever we find Friday and Saturday during our massive bike search. Hope to see you Saturday!

Holy Cow

Today was a good day at the shop. We managed to sell EVERY road bike we had ready to go as well as almost every mountain bike and a cruiser to boot. I've removed all the bikes from the main site that sold. If it looks a little empty in the online store, that's nothing compared to the shop. We're down to a few BMX, a pair of cruisers, and an assortment of non-standard bikes. I have two or three bikes to add to the website later tonight (I have a party to celebrate the forming of the Graduate Student Union to attend at the moment). We also have about a 1/2 dozen bikes in the shop that are close to being ready. This includes 3 hybrid bikes! It's been a while since we had any of those so don't miss this chance! And before you ask, I'm not taking orders. You gotta come in to claim them.

This looks promising

I’ve spent years (on and off) studying how these systems work and more frequently, don’t work. This attempt looks like a much smarter attempt than pervious efforts. One of the biggest issues with these systems has always been the common property issue. If everyone own the bikes then taking one home for permanent use is much easier. Further, if you don’t own it directly there’s little incentive to treat the bike with care. This program assigns temporary private property rights and thereby avoids the issue. What’s even nicer is that the designers took even the threat of vandalism into account and designed the bikes to be as sturdy and tamper resistant as possible.
I’m also a fan of the infrastructure design, or the lack of infrastructure. Because each terminal does not need to be hard wired into the city’s grid, the stations are effectively portable and cheap to run. Also, by not being tethered to a location, the stations can be redistributed as demand dictates and can be stored when the weather turns (this is Canada, the weather will always turn foul).
The only obvious drawback is the pricing system. A high initial cost (~$4) is combined with an hourly rate that can make renting a bike for a ride around town very expensive. Further, a very large hold is placed on the credit card (~$216) which makes this system impractical for anyone but the heavy users who buy a year’s pass or the tourist looking for a fun way to see the city.
Thoughts?

The Return of the Bike

Remember the good old days when a GBP bike only cost $50? I miss those days. It used to be that we got good, reasonable quality bikes on the cheap all the time. Lately it's been all we can do to find bikes to sell for twice that price. That is, until this week. So far we've picked up 5 mountain bikes (3 of the 24" wheel variety) that'll be on sale for only $50 this Saturday. Add that to the Mongoose already in the shop and that means we've got 6 mountain bikes for the economically minded (read: poor college student). We of course still have a slew of road bikes and BMX bikes for those of you who are looking for something different. See you Saturday!