In the northwest suburbs, buying a bicycle can be cheap and trying to sell a used one can be useless. At Sunday’s Buffalo Grove Farmers Market, however, a local agency will collect unwanted bikes, in any condition, in a drive that will make them worth something again.
“It doesn’t matter if they’re broken,” said Mark Steuer, a member of the Buffalo Grove Environmental Action Team. “We even accept parts. If you only have pedals or inner tubes, we’ll take them.”
Steuer is organizing the group’s third-annual collection of unwanted bikes, from 8 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Sunday at the market, 951 N. McHenry Road, near the Rylko Community Park sprayground. The donations will go to the Working Bikes Cooperative, a Chicago nonprofit that repairs old bicycles and delivers them to underdeveloped nations, where having two wheels can open a recipient up to new job and educational opportunities.
“We do this every chance we get,” Working Bikes founder Lee Ravenscroft said of partnering with other agencies for collections. “In a developing country, there’s no junkyards. Everything is reused. Used bikes don’t have a lot of value here, but they are worth a lot there.”
That could change as bicycles become more commonly used in the suburbs.
“There’s a huge business behind getting the streets safe for bicyclists,” said Barb Cornew, suburban outreach coordinator for the Active Transportation Alliance – one of several groups, she said, hoping to make the collar of Chicagoland more welcoming to riders.
ATA is an advocacy and consulting group that markets biking, walking and public transportation to municipal authorities and planning agencies. Cornew said she believed that, in the years to come, residents of villages built to be driven to and through will embrace the health, environmental and economic benefits of riding. As they do, the ATA and other organizations are lobbying planners to design streets with bicycle traffic built in.
“All roadways should accommodate all users,” Cornew said. “The roadways really need to be thought about.”
Jerry Meyerhoff, another member of Buffalo Grove’s Environmental Action Team, said street-layout changes would have to be accompanied by changes in the thought process.
“We’ve got this suburban mentality of ‘automobile,’” Meyerhoff said. “Now, we’re trying to undo that. A lot of people perceive, ‘Well, I put my bike on my car, and I drive to a trail.’ In Illinois, we have a 3-foot rule and hardly anybody knows about it — except bicyclists.”
Cornew said that major vehicle paths like Lake Cook Road likely will never be targeted for bicycle traffic; smaller streets that carry fewer cars will serve that purpose better. Of course, any change to make streets more bike friendly, be it adding new stripes for a shared lane or the construction of a new multiuse path, will require funding.
“Biking is definitely huge in the suburbs,” Cornew said. “The goal is really to get these plans to develop.”
Cornew and Ravenscroft noted that communities will need to work together, as a bicycle lane that ends at one suburb’s city limit does little good to a pedal-powered commuter.
“Do they go where you need to go? Can you get safely to the Metra station, that’s the thing,” Ravenscroft said. “There’s plenty of places to go to exercise, but can you get to work?”
One way to start a change locally, Steuer said, was to get people thinking about their unused bicycles. He said the team’s collection drive brought 60 cycles to Working Bikes in 2010 and 90 in 2011, despite the second year being cut to only two hours because of a downpour.
Steuer believes there are more bikes that could be donated Sunday — owners holding onto bicycles for sentimental reasons or mistakenly thinking that it is a collectible or worthless junk.
“They think it has no value, or they think it has too much value and it’s an antique or something,” Steuer said. “It’s a lot of those bikes we’re getting.”
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