out of readily available rectangular steel tubes. When a given design is called for, a small manufacturer could pull out the appropriate jig from a stored collection. If it’s hard to imagine a transition to small scale manufacturing in the US, VanderTuin points to the experience of the Intermediate Technology Development Group (ITDG) in Britain. The OxTrike project designed a loadcarrying tricycle from scratch, specifically so it could be built inexpensively with tools and materials available in any developing country. For example, the brakes are constricting bands, and the brake lever is a pedal on the frame. Most significantly, ITDG taught a detailed, intelligent, shop-worn manufacturing process to the potential builders. They’ve since set up dozens of OxTrike community workshops around the world. The situation in the US is similar: few are now involved in community-level bike production, and setting up the appropriate scale for a new type of bike here is very much like doing a third world development project. So like a development worker, in addition to making the bikes, VanderTuin teaches workbike design and manufacture to the community, in conjunction with the University of Oregon. Sometimes you have to start a third world project to bring appropriate technology to first world neighborhoods. VanderTuin visited such a group at the Universitat Oldenburg in Germany: their international development group produced and broadcast a television show detailing the construction of a bicycle trailer. They also taught community workshops in which people built trailers - now tailing bikes and mopeds throughout Germany. Of course communities benefit by more directly supporting their own appropriate technology research. An experimental bicycle group VanderTuin knew in Frankfurt, established as a state vocational school, created unusual, useful designs such as rainproof bikes and trikes for the handicapped. A group of ex-students from this school founded a co-op whose bicycles are now well-known in Germany. In Hamburg another group has established a neighborhood center in which they live, work and do community service. They run a bicycle workshop cooperatively with the community where, for a subsistence fee, people come to get help creating bikes for unusual needs. In the US local inventors are unable to support themselves doing appropriate technology work like this, and no one helps since the prevailing ideology pressures them to make a business success of it, alone. Community supported organizations can incubate endless applications of appropriate technology. Workbikes are used in local delivery of mail, pizzas, groceries, laundry and other goods. They transport the elderly, children and anyone else who needs to get anywhere. Ideally service operations are owned and run by the neighborhood, allowing them to determine in open assembly if the appropriate services are being provided. Greenpeace Europe’s EcoBike campaign highlighted what happens when a community does not control its own bike technology. Greenpeace listed torrents of wastes and toxins associated with normal bike production; they constructed an alternative bike using the cleanest methods they could find, given their limited research funds. Most current bike production is not only environmentally unsound: bicycle factories, and affiliated mining operations, wield sufficient clout to displace people in developing countries, and to overwork unionless assemblers in politically oppressive states like Taiwan. Both the technology and economics of manufacturing have to change if they are to be truly ecological. In the impersonal world-market the creativity of bicycle makers is stifled and the needs of bicycle riders are not addressed. VanderTuin and his colleagues are giving us a set of solutions. But until deep problems are tackled more directly, by more people, the original vehicle of personal liberation, and the modem symbol of ecological awareness, will not fulfill its potential. Addenda: The Wori^ike Woritbook, diverse & detailed workbike materials VanderTuin has collected over the years, is available nowfor $10 postpaid. He is also writing another workbike book, available next year. Contact him about the book or the bikes at Human Powered Machines, P. 0. Box 1005, Eugene, OR 97440, phone: (503) 343-5568. The Bikes themselves costfrom $669 to $949for the Baker's Bike, $995 to $1700for the Long Jan, depending on gearing, racks, containers, insulation and components. “TIG welded cromoly with powder coatfinish”, and every penny ofprofit goes into furthering community bicycling. Rain Winter/Spring 1992 Volume XIV, Number 2 Page 17
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