Ray Eliot’s title at Reno Bike Project is also his job description—“Mechanic Educator, Bicycle Repair Class Instructor, & All Around Mensch.”i
Reno Bike PRoject tuRns 10 this yeaR
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ver its first decade, the Reno Bike Project has grown from an idea that a few friends started tossing around to a full-service bike shop and a spirited community organization. Its goals are to make bicycling as safe and accessible to as many people as possible. In the bike project’s early years, it amassed support and established stability—and now it looks forward to its future roles as an advocacy group in a developing Reno. In the mid-2000s, Noah ChubbSilverman was attending college in Bellingham, Washington, and volunteering for a community bike shop called The Hub, which collects donated bikes, repairs them, sells them and offers bike-repair education. In 2006, he moved back to Reno, his hometown. That same year, his friend Kyle Kozar graduated from the University of Nevada, Reno. The two, along with artist Mike Burke, began kicking around ideas for a new organization using The Hub as a model. Thus was born the Reno Bike Project. The group started soliciting used-bike donations and storing them in a friend’s yard. The next step, Chubb-Silverman said,
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Ride On S TO R Y & P H OTO S BY K R I S VAG N E R was “just getting people together in various places to fix the donated bikes and sell them—or to help other people fix their bikes.” “I’m not sure that everyone quite understood exactly what we were going after,” he said. But still, people seemed eager to help. Silverman credits the bike project’s early success in recruiting volunteers to three separate phenomena. “It was the height of the fixed-gear bike craze,” he said. “And it was, I think, about halfway through the Iraq War, so gas prices
were at the highest they’ve ever been.” (A survey by national advocacy group People For Bikes found that in 2009, “80 percent of retailers said gas prices were helping them sell more bikes for transportation.”) Also, organizers knew several recent college grads with few commitments and a lot of enthusiasm, many of whom volunteered. “We also got some monetary support early, which helped us achieve some goals, buying equipment and tools, pretty quickly, much quicker than we actually expected,” said Chubb-Silverman. The group received
a donation from the city during its first year—“about $8,000,” he remembers—and also support from a foundation run by a volunteer’s parents. Two years into its existence, RBP hired its first employee, a bike mechanic. The group set up shop on Bell Street in 2008. Then, in 2009, it found a permanent storefront on East Fourth Street. The biggest setback RBP encountered was the drying of donation and grant funding in 2008-09 during the recession. While it slowed growth, that problem turned out to have a silver lining. “We largely learned to subsist on revenue from our shop,” said Chubb-Silverman. That revenue comes from sales of used bikes and parts, professional repairs and, to a lesser extent, repair-station rentals, which run $4 an hour, including advice. Chubb-Silverman and Kozar kept their day jobs for a while. During the third year, they began splitting the executive director salary. Now, Chubb-Silverman is the sole executive director, and RBP has “seven or eight employees” and a small army of volunteers and interns.
