Bike Valet Victories

March 21, 2011 at 12:38 pm | Posted in Bike News, Get Involved, LACBC Events | 3 Comments
Tags: Bicycle Parking, Bike Valet, CicLAvia

Bobby here with an update LACBC’s growing Bike Valet program. (What the heck is Bike Valet? Check out this post). Woody and I have built new Bike Valet racks that take our whole program to the next level of bike awesomeness. We set out with the goal of building a system that would be easy to run completely with bike trailers, obviating the need for any dastardly infernal combustion engines. We’ve settled on a design that breaks down into light aluminum tubes. A few weeks ago we rode up to Industrial Metal Supply way up in the Valley to pick up some more aluminum:

Woody hauls his ladder trailer up through the valley

When we got there we shopped around for remnants, and picked out our aluminum:

shiny new aluminum

After haggling a little bit, we made our purchases and loaded up the trailer. We turned down some offers of rides in trucks from friendly construction guys. I still think we got back to LA faster in the rush hour traffic!

Woody straps the tubes down to the ladder trailer

Woody and I took turns hauling the trailer on the way back. It is surprisingly fun to haul 200 pounds of weight! Back at the ranch, Woody and I chop-sawed the tubes:

choppin through the aluminum

And here are the resulting racks – super strong:

Bobby tests out the racks

We use these cool snap-buttons to hold them together. The whole shindig breaks down into light tubes that can be strapped to a trailer:

easy break down!

We built this new set just in time for the CicLAvia fund raiser on March 5th, which was a smashing success. We parked over 200 bikes – which was a third of the total attendees at the event:

Bike Valet volunteers Allan and Chris help out a client

Thanks to Allan, Chris, Janet, Sinar, Janina, Henry and Carlos for volunteering with team Bike Valet. Everyone had a really great time, and it was a good warm up for the REAL CicLAvia coming up on April 10th. We will be running a Bike Valet for all the restaurants and merchants in Little Tokyo, so I’m looking for some volunteers. I’ll be running two shifts, one from 10AM to 12:30PM and 12:30PM to 3PM, so you’ll still be able to enjoy riding around the CicLAvia. If you’re interested in the fun times email me at bikevalet@la-bike.org

 

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