Youth en Route collects donated and salvaged bikes, fixes them up and gets them into schools and places where they’ll be ridden. But if the structural integrity of the frame is compromised, through rust, cracking or dents, the bike frame lands in metal recycling. Until now. We wanted to find a use for these old…
We see it time and again. Keen cyclist / high school student rides bike to school on a cold winter day. It’s the only bike in the schools rack – and it’s easy pickings for thieves because only the front tire is locked to rack. All a bad guy has to do is loosen the…
By Tim Schaefer Imagine you’re an elementary or middle school kid, it’s the end of the school day, you go out to the bike rack and discover your bike has been stolen. What a traumatic experience! Sadly, this is exactly what happened in late fall 2021, at the Riverside school located in the community of…
Long steel racks, with rebars posts a 3-4 inches apart were designed in the 1950s to hold bikes upright. They don’t work as locking racks because it’s too hard to get the bike’s frame close to anything solid to lock to. Youth en Route, working with local fabricator Keith Simmons, and Bishop McNally Teachers Joe…
What is in virtually every school yard in Canada and is practically useless? The bike rack. Usually installed over 50 years ago, these solid metal racks are rusty, unwieldy, and don’t allow students to get the frame of their bike close enough to anything solid to lock it securely. “They were meant to hold the…
