Middbrief: Bike shop re-opens for spring

Starting the week after Spring Break, the Middlebury College Bike Shop reopened for the first time since the fall, and will remain open through finals period. The space for the shop, which first opened in 2007, is located in the basement of Adirondack House, with its entrance facing Ross Dining Hall. The shop has a total of four full-time employees: Bike Shop Manager Chris DiOrio ’12, Assistant Manager Roman Mardoyan-Smyth ’11, and mechanics Jesse Gubb ’10 and Ian Durkin ’10.5. These four students, with the help of substitute mechanics, spent several weeks getting the space ready for the second half of spring term.

“We reorganized the shop and cleaned up a lot,” DiOrio said. “And this semester, we’re starting a rental bike program.”

The rental bike program was funded by a grant from the Environmental Council. DiOrio and Mardoyan-Smyth plan on renting over 20 bikes to students for a price of 25 dollars per semester. Many of these bikes were old and salvaged to be rebuilt for this purpose.
DiOrio and Mardoyan-Smyth are looking forward to providing this opportunity for students. They want to encourage people to use bikes instead of cars, and to enjoy them. They may even start a day rental program, depending on the demand.

“We’re going to have people sign a rental contract that is hooked up to BannerWeb,” DiOrio continued. “So if people mess up bikes or don’t bring them back we can keep track of them. We don’t know if we’re going to be giving them locks or not, but we will charge them for the cost of replacing the bike if they lose it.”

Starting this week, the Bike Shop will introduce another new feature: bicycle registration. The managers coordinated with the Department of Public Safety to register bicycles in the same way that it is done at Public Safety Office. On Friday, April 9, the Bike Shop will be hosting a welcoming event for students from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m., where the managers and mechanics will provide the means to register students’ bicycles.

Mardoyan-Smyth hopes that the bike rental program and the ability to register bicycles will bring more students into the Bike Shop.
“I hope to see people here all the time, especially people who don’t have bikes and want to build up new bikes,” he said. “Our primary purpose here at the Bike Shop is to help people who have problems fixing their bikes so that they can learn how to do it themselves. Once they learn to fix their bikes, they have that skill for life, which is great.”

The Bike Shop focuses on sustainability by reusing any and all bike parts for future bicycle reconstructions. Every spring when the Bike Shop reopens, the managers bring out the bicycles that people were working on in the fall and ask those students if they plan to continue building their bicycles. If they are interested, the bicycles are reserved for them, and if they are not, the managers and mechanics put the bicycles back into circulation.

One Bike Shop regular, Edwin Suh ’12, says that he spends a lot of time working on his bicycle in the Bike Shop because it is the greatest place to be.

“I get to be productive by working on my bike, and I enjoy the company,” Suh said. “I actually got this bike here, and it was once a piece of scrap. Now I ride it around, and it rides better than most bikes on campus.”

Suh thinks that there are not enough people who know about the Bike Shop. Like Mardoyan-Smyth, he hopes that more students will use the space after the welcoming event kickoff.

This spring, the Bike Shop will be open on Fridays and Saturdays from 4 to 8 p.m., and eventually on Thursdays from 4 to 8 p.m.