Need a Bike? This Montana Shop Will Give You One for Free
How do you get more people to ride bicycles? The question bedevils every cycling enthusiast and fuels a large sector of industry and advocacy. Bob Giordano of Missoula, Montana, has a simple answer: Give them a bike (or help them repair the one they already have).
Giordano started his mission to create more bikers by distributing shared bicycles among his community, as well as setting up a stall at local events to repair bikes for free. After years of grassroots advocacy and hopping between small garages for their repair work, Giordano and his team landed a permanent spot, buying a retail location and opening Free Cycles. The unique shop upcycles old bikes to give away to children, sells inexpensive refurbished bicycles, helps walk-ins with free repairs, and even teaches people to build or repair their own rides.
As executive director, Giordano has watched the bike shop evolve into a lively community hub and says peak summer days can bring up to 200 customers, with many “just learning how to patch a tube or put a bike together from scratch.” Some of those 25,000 yearly visitors later become volunteers and develop useful career skills. Adults can get a free bike by learning to build their own from spare parts and then contributing hours as a volunteer.
Free Cycles is also the home base for the Missoula Institute for Sustainable Transit (MIST), an advocacy organization pursuing multi-modal transportation solutions in the area. And its impact has grown beyond bikes: Free Cycles has become a music venue and organic neighborhood hangout for the fast-growing, outdoors-loving community. “We're not a bar, we're not a house, we're not a public library. We're kind of in the middle there,” says Giordano.
Kevin Davis is the leader of the Strong Towns Local Conversation in Missoula, and he has co-hosted meetings with Giordano at Free Cycles. He says Giordano and his team are “doing an incredible job, both locally and regionally, with bringing attention to the need for safer bike infrastructure, and also (by) providing bikes and parts and tools and educational sessions to get more bikes on the road.”
(Proposal images for new bike infrastructure hanging on the wall in Free Cycles.)
Davis says that parts of Missoula, including the area around Free Cycles that accesses a popular local trail, are quite hospitable to cycling. But the local Strong Towns group is seeking safety enhancements on the Reserve Street corridor, which Davis calls a “quintessential stroad.” It’s also U.S. Highway 93, which runs from Canada to Mexico and brings a “tremendous amount of commercial traffic, everyday commuter traffic from different parts of western Montana, plus locals like me who use it to get to and from work, for medical appointments or to do our grocery shopping. And then you tack on the various modes of mobility, and it becomes very problematic.”
Davis says local advocates worked with the city to help get a federal grant to execute a long-overdue safety study on one of “the most dangerous corridors in all of Montana. So that's a huge accomplishment.”
But since the expected safety improvements won’t come for several years, the Strong Towns group is taking a next-smallest-step approach by buying high-visibility orange flags for one of the most dangerous unmarked intersections on Highway 93, where a young girl was struck and seriously injured.
Both local leaders are working together to ensure Missoula’s rapid growth doesn’t adversely affect safe biking and walking. Davis points out that more human-powered trips reduce cars on the road, which benefits drivers as well, and he’s trying hard to reduce the “unnecessary, unproductive hostility between motorists and bicyclists.” He also says it’s important for advocates to think proactively and bring ideas to the table. “Sometimes officials look at us as complainers. And while we do bring awareness to problems, we at the same time like to suggest solutions,” says Davis.
Giordano echoes that theme, adding that mitigating the effects of the incoming population can be a matter of better land use. “Growth of people does not have to mean growth of automobile trips. You can actually reduce trips by having more grocery stores, more cafes, more services, more walkability." He points out that if the surrounding counties can grow, too, then their residents won't need to drive into Missoula as often, further reducing automobile trips.
Giordano sees his advocacy work as planting the seeds for future expansion of human-powered transportation. “If I can go teach a student group the value of roundabouts or protected bike lanes, sometimes that's a lot better than even changing City Council's mind because we're trying to grow culture. In my mind, it's a victory if you can just get people thinking.”
He hopes the success of Free Cycles will inspire others who are driven to improve their communities, and he points to the decision to buy the property the store stands on as crucial. “It's not a bad route to buy a piece of property, use half of it for what you need to, and then have some renters, and give them a good deal and make it a synergy of organizations.” That said, he’s currently rallying to fund a balloon mortgage payment and doesn’t whitewash that it’s hard work.
Strong Towns President Chuck Marohn visited Free Cycles in 2022 and came away inspired. “There is nobody that I've ever seen or run into who has done more to advance the idea of a culture of biking and walking than this group has. And they didn’t start out with a massive grant or some big program, they just did the simplest thing that they could do, and then the next thing.”
Ben Abramson is a Staff Writer at Strong Towns. In his career as a travel journalist with The Washington Post and USA TODAY, Ben has visited many destinations that show how Americans were once world-class at building appealing, prosperous places at a human scale. He has also seen the worst of the suburban development pattern, and joined Strong Towns because of its unique way of framing the problems we can all see and intuit, and focusing on local, achievable solutions. A native of Washington, DC, Ben lives in Venice, Florida; summers in Atlantic Canada; and loves hiking, biking, kayaking, and beachcombing.