500 bikes for Sudanese charity blocked at Scottish port

[Ming the Merciless]

They're the Golgafrinchans.

We need more hairdressers

 

[C R]

We need more hairdressers

And public phone sanitisers.

 

[Jameshow]

We need more hairdressers

And bookies, charity and vape shops!!

 

[bonzobanana]

@bonzobanana: I make no comment on the political parts of your post, which as @glasgowcyclist says are better aired over on the NACA part of the forum. However, I'm in a position to comment on some of your suggestions.

Firstly, finding a way for people who can't afford a bike, to get a decent bike is a very worthy goal.



Teaching people bike maintenance is also a great idea. Teaching and learning requires aptitude and interest on the part of the person being taught, and knowledge and ability to teach from the teacher. It also requires time; time to observe, attempt, repeat, make mistakes, repeat again, and master a skill. Even a person with the ability to learn has to go through this process; this is why here a basic apprenticeship in bike maintenance takes two years; it's to give time to learn skills, and then apply them in different situations.

Let's say our goal is to teach one person to fix one bike; they need to understand the principles behind wheels, the braking system, the gears sufficiently to be able to make them work. It takes a while to teach someone to do this, even if you 'only' tech them to fix, say, V-Brakes, and ignore every other system.

If you then give the bike to the person for free, who pays for the replaced parts and time? In our workshop, we calculated that one set of V-Brake blocks is 5€. Fitting is five minutes or 5,40€. Replacement Brake cables are about 15€ with inner, outer, caps, et c. Fitting is about ten minutes or 10,40€. A chain is ca. 20€ and a rear block/cassette is another 15€, plus time. If the wheels aren't straight, or the tyres need changing, the cost increases rapidly.

I would calculate a basic 50€ for a bike once it was on the stand, plus 15€ for any and all used parts, plus the cost of new parts. To this you need to add, rent/electricity, and broken parts and tools because parts and tools get broken when people are learning.

It is hard to repair a bike under 100€, and the usual price for a good, solid, and well repaired used bike that conforms to German safety regulations is usually in the 175€ to 250€ range. This is a great disappointment to people who come assuming they can get a good bike for a tenner.

That's for a mechanic, and in our case a mechanic that is pretty much free for us because they're being paid by the local authority through grants or training schemes.

Now, you could say that the people are doing the work for themselves, but you need a trainer to be at the very least on hand, and the trainer will need to check the bike before it leaves the workshop. You may be lucky and have a volunteer competent bike wrench/trainer. If you have to pay someone, a trainer costs more than a repair man, and it takes far, far longer to teach someone to repair things than it does to just fix them.

We have a system in Tübingen where the town subsidises bike repairs for someone once every three months, up to 20€ for parts and 27€ for the work. In theory, we are supposed to teach the people how to do the repairs, but in practice this doesn't work. Very few are interested, which is fair enough, and we don't have the time. So we just take them like a regular customer's bike and fix them as fast as we can.

Also, I've unfortunately found that some people who are given free bikes don't look after them, trash them, and in some cases then come back assuming we will essentially rebuild it for free or give them another free bike because it 'doesn't work'.

"Free" bike rental has the same issue; bike share/hire works because you have the name and address of the person using the bike. Unfortunately, without this accountability, bikes end up in a canal. There's also the matter of maintenance, which costs money, and insurance, which costs money.



I very quickly decided that people would be allowed to buy the bike we'd repaired, and would not be able to select from the unrepaired bikes, the reason being you can't tell if a bike is fixable before you have checked it first. People picking their own bike will probably be very disappointed if the bike can't be repaired, and to give you some idea, I'd say we can repair about 1 in 5 of the bikes we get. After all, there's a reason they've been thrown away/abandoned/"donated".

I personally don't think its a complicated as that, many basic level bikes share the same parts so if you have a reasonable collection of bikes you can salvage parts from them. The sort of people that would want to refurbish their own bike like this would of course be the people who have some sort of basic mechanical skill. Such a scheme would not appeal to everyone. Really my point is the country has lost a huge amount of taxation to import more bikes into the UK when we are have a serious trade deficit and incredible debts. People blindly send all their wages out of the country and seem to blame everyone else but themselves for our economic woes. A scheme where some bikes are restored to use would seem a lot cheaper to me. Some may repair their own bikes, others may be repaired by volunteers and sold at low prices for others to have cheap access to transport. Lets not confuse weak performance bikes with entry level bikes which don't have proprietary components and are easily repaired using parts from other bikes. Some bikes have got more complicated to repair but others have not they rely on traditional parts. Simple 6/7 speed chains are available on amazon for something like £2.50. Entry level bikes do not have expensive parts so what can't be salvaged doesn't have to be a huge expense.

A free hire scheme doesn't have to mean there is no process at all for collecting and dropping off and the bikes can still be tagged. The reason countries in Africa take these bikes is because they are easy to repair and strong, they are durable bikes that withstand bad treatment and are easily fixed compared to many other bikes. People in Africa can fix these bikes with even less resources and training than here. These bikes are a useful resource here too. A free bike or loan bike could be available to a wide range of people.

People on benefits often have access to support like cheap used computers, food and some other services. I personally don't think a bike is much different. Getting a voucher to collect a bike from a charitable workshop is not that difficult and having facilities where people can repair a free bike from other scrap bikes is not beyond organisation either. People in Africa repair their bikes with a lot less resources than that so we should be able to do that as good if not better. We need to promote refurbishing and repair much more. There is a global environmental crisis and a financial crisis too, people need to understand the damage they are causing by constantly importing new short life weak products and motivate them to repair products and use existing products for longer.

We are still importing many basic bikes as new if you deplete the second-hand availability of such bikes then it causes more imports.

Sadly this country seems to be on economic self-destruct not understanding the importance of running a trading surplus and living within your means. It's a madhouse quite frankly with a huge section of moronic idealistic people that has led to so many problems. It just feels we will hit rock bottom before people wake up to reality and the huge problems they have caused. The economic stupidity of so many people in this country is frankly beyond belief.

However if nothing else it would be nice to have a scheme that actually helps the poorest in society to actually get a working bicycle rather than a scheme which benefits the richest the most and has a reducing effect as your income reduces until there is no benefit at all for the poorest in society despite those people being most in need of a bicycle.

 

[Andy in Germany]

I personally don't think its a complicated as that, many basic level bikes share the same parts so if you have a reasonable collection of bikes you can salvage parts from them.

A lot of people underestimate the challenges involved: I rapidly found that organising the stores and bikes took a huge amount of my time. Fortunately, I had some clients who could organise things.

In my last workshop we collected bikes from all the local recycling centres in the county; we had on average about 100 bikes in the "to be repaired" section and the "to be taken to bits" section, or as I called them "the quick and the dead". Even with this pool, and my team getting extremely efficient at knowing what to salvage, cleaning and storing things to a ridiculous level of organisation, we had constant issues with used parts availability.

I've now moved to a new workshop. Here, we get all the abandoned bikes in Tübingen, which is a bike friendly student city, similar to Oxford or Cambridge. We get upwards of 4-500 in a year, plus donated bikes. Even with this flow of bikes and wheels infesting every corner for the workshop, we often don't have the right part for the bike we need to fix.

Lets not confuse weak performance bikes with entry level bikes which don't have proprietary components and are easily repaired using parts from other bikes.

Unfortunately, there isn't a lot of difference when they reach us, and "just swapping parts" isn't as simple as we'd like it to be. Part of the problem is that "basic level" bikes are the most cheaply made, and they're generally badly maintained. Even the entry level bikes which aren't awful when built are often beyond repair by the time they get to us, and it's all we can do to take the non-metal parts off to put them in the scrap. As I said above, at our most efficient we were repairing about one bike in five. The bikes we manage to repair were generally mid-range bikes.

People in Africa repair their bikes with a lot less resources than that so we should be able to do that as good if not better.

This is true, but do they have to repair them to German (or UK) standards? I can't send a bike out unless it is roadworthy according to the German authorities; in fact, in my current position, I won't be able to sign off on bikes until I pass the trade guild exam. I should be ready for that in about eight months. Again, all this costs time and therefore money.

However if nothing else it would be nice to have a scheme that actually helps the poorest in society to actually get a working bicycle

That's basically what I do. As I said above it works because we're paid to help people by the Job Centre and other government agencies, and so much of our labour is free, and on top of that we get an income independent of bike sales.

That said we are a charity, and we welcome volunteers, so if you ever want to have a working holiday in one of the most beautiful cities in Germany, itself in one of the most beautiful regions in Germany let me know...

 

[C R]

A lot of people underestimate the challenges involved: I rapidly found that organising the stores and bikes took a huge amount of my time. Fortunately, I had some clients who welcomed the challenge...

In my last workshop we collected bikes from all the local recycling centres in the county; we had on average about 100 bikes in the "to be repaired" section and the "to be taken to bits" section, or as I called them "the quick and the dead". Even with this pool, and my team getting extremely efficient at knowing what to salvage, cleaning and storing things to a ridiculous level of organisation, we had constant issues with used parts availability.

I've now moved to a new workshop. Here, we get all the abandoned bikes in Tübingen, which is a bike friendly student city, similar to Oxford or Cambridge. We get upwards of 4-500 in a year, plus donated bikes. Even with this flow of bikes and wheels infesting every corner for the workshop, we often don't have the right part for the bike we need to fix.



Unfortunately, there isn't a lot of difference when they reach us, and "just swapping parts" isn't as simple as we'd like it to be. Part of the problem is that "basic level" bikes are the most cheaply made, and they're generally badly maintained. Even the entry level bikes which aren't awful when built are often beyond repair by the time they get to us, and it's all we can do to take the non-metal parts off to put them in the scrap. As I said above, at our most efficient we were repairing about one bike in five. The bikes we manage to repair were generally mid-range bikes.



This is true, but do they have to repair them to German (or UK) standards? I can't send a bike out unless it is roadworthy according to the German authorities; in fact, in my current position, I won't be able to sign off on bikes until I pass the trade guild exam. I should be ready for that in about eight months. Again, all this costs time and therefore money.



That's basically what I do. As I said above it works because we're paid to help people by the Job Centre and other government agencies, and so much of our labour is free, and on top of that we get an income independent of bike sales.

That said we are a charity, and we welcome volunteers, so if you ever want to have a working holiday in one of the most beautiful cities in Germany, itself in one of the most beautiful regions in Germany let me know...

Andy's explanation can be summed up in the dictum, for every problem there's a solution which is obvious, simple... and wrong.