A Tempe bike shop, Bike Saviours, rests on the northwest corner of Broadway and Roosevelt in Tempe with the mission of educating the community on bike maintenance. One of the results is the Build-A-Bike program, which equips the community with inexpensive well-built bikes. A perfect option for ASU students low on money, but high on a need to get around. The Build-A-Bikes range from $80 to $110. Access is provided for tools to fix bikes as well at $5 an hour and a max of $15 a day.
Kristian Doak: If you're a new freshman who just started at ASU and you needed a bike to get around, you could come over to Bike Saviours and there are a couple different options that we have I'd lay out for you. One we do have some pre-built bikes and generally during the beginning of the semester we make sure that we have pre-built bikes to install so that, there are options there for people who are in a hurry. But what I really recommend, is our Build-A-Bike program.
Mike Nuccio: So people donate their bikes to us out of their backyard or their garage. The bikes that are donated to us, people come in and they express an interest in building them and we show them what we have in the back. We have a whole bunch of bikes lined up in the back in our storage and we help the customer find something according to their size, their needs. If they want to commute or if they want to go shred the trails mountain biking or if they want to go fast or whatever it is and then once they pick one out they put a ten dollar deposit on it and then we hand them a little checklist that goes trough the entire process of how to build it back up to a road worthy condition.
Kristian Doak: Then we take you through the entire process of taking the entire bike apart. Cleaning it. Fixing it lubricating whatever needs to be done, and so on so forth. Put it all back together and we walk you through every single step of that process. You have a brand new bike at the end.
Mike Nuccio: It's our flagship program. People really really enjoy it. It's how I got started and it teaches you the ins and outs of your bicycle and if the person does like mechanical things or engineering or learning how things work it's a wonderfully enjoyable experience.
Kristian Doak: We also have a lot of ASU students who come in and they go through the whole build a bike process and they find it very rewarding. We find really rewarding to help them out. There’s a good symbiosis there.
Mike Nuccio: We advanced bicycles, we advance people, and we advance community.
Reach the reporter at zvanarsd@asu.edu or follow @ZachVanArs on Twitter.
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Zach Van Arsdale was the head of the multimedia department from August 2020 to May 2022, shaping design and multimedia storytelling at The State Press in addition to designing article experiences, illustrations and taking photographs. He has previously worked for The Howard Center of Investigative Journalism and on the Carnegie-Knight News21 project: "Unmasking America."
