Bike library has it handled

Fort Collins gearing up for more branches

By James B. Meadow, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published December 27, 2008 at 12:05 a.m.

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Photo by Rich Abrahamson / The Coloradoan

Bicyclist Brian Shaver enters the Fort Collins Bike Library this year. Residents and visitors can borrow a bike for up to five days for free, which helps reduce downtown traffic congestion and air pollution.

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If you think a municipal library system with just two branches and an inventory that is barely 200-strong is just spinning its wheels, well, you're right.

If, that is, you're talking about the one in Fort Collins, where bikes - not books - rule, and pedaling - not perusing - is paramount.

The Fort Collins Bike Library, which debuted last April, offers locals and visitors alike the opportunity to borrow a bike for up to five days and not pay a penny. All it takes is a picture ID and a credit card (just in case you trash the bike or any of the accessories - helmet, light, etc. - that are also available at no charge).

True, during the wintertime, library hours have been cut back to weekends only. But that was expected - hey, you'd have to be missing a few links on your chain to want to cycle recreationally in sub-freezing temperatures. But it was during the peak cycling summer months that the library proved a mega draw to people who wanted to exercise both their bodies and their right not to add to downtown traffic congestion and air pollution.

"This program has been highly successful . . . the comments we've received have been super positive," said Dave Kemp ("People call me DK"), the city's bike program manager.

Although it was the beneficiary of a two-year, $132,000 grant from the Federal Highway Administration's Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality Program, the bike library still has to cough up 20 percent of the cost. And after 2009 - when the federal money runs out - no one knows for sure how the program will be subsidized.

Of course, if Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., has his way, Uncle Sam won't have to ante up any dough.

Coburn recently vented against the bike library by including it in his "Worst Waste of the Year" report. After referring to it as a "low-priority and questionable" project, Coburn lumped the library together with the likes of a plan to insert microchips into saguaro cactuses, to track them if they are stolen, and a grant that went to remount the world's largest stuffed fish.

But Fort Collins wasn't too stung by Coburn's dis.

"No, I wasn't mad," DK said, brushing off the Sooner send-off as "something we might expect from an Oklahoma senator who probably doesn't have bicycling as a priority for his state."

Jim Clark, president of the Fort Collins Convention and Visitors Bureau, said he is a fan of the freebie bikes, explaining that during the summer, his office had a "ton of people" requesting information on library loaners.

In fact, other than the bureau's general tourist guide to Fort Collins, "the cycling map is the most requested thing in our office," he said.

Given this, it's probably not surprising that 60 percent of the library's summer customers were out-of-towners.

But whether they were visitors or residents, library patrons formed a formidable chain gang. From April through November, DK estimates that "about 2,000 people" used the library's bikes to the tune of 21,154 miles. Those people-powered miles were "equivalent to 9.7 metric tons of carbon dioxide not being released into the atmosphere," he said.

If air pollution was down, then readership - uh, ridership - during the peak spring and summer cycling months comprised such a rising curve that the initial inventory of 25 bikes swelled to more than 100 by autumn. What's more, DK said, "By next year, we expect to have 220 bikes in the library, and we'll be expanding from two branches - where people can pick up a bike - to four."

Where these bikes come from - and how they are paid for - is another reason that library backers aren't exactly going "shhh" when touting their baby. You see, the vast majority are bikes that were abandoned, collected and then refurbished by a core of hard-core bicycle backers. And Fort Collins received a generous donation of 29 relatively new bikes that were used during the Democratic National Convention.

According to DK, this bicycle infusion is "kind of a piece of history." But, even better than history is, "There are some really good models - Schwinns and Raleighs - with fenders and everything."

And it is pretty clear that when it comes to having a bike library, the citizens of, and visitors to, Fort Collins have definitely, uh, spoke-en.

meadowj@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2606

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