Ride Club Stories

A string of 9-13 year olds on bikes riding across the Pulaski Bridge and down Manhattan Avenue would be an odd sight indeed if it were not for Recycle-a-Bicycle's Summer ride club. Every Friday this summer 10 to 15 kids gathered early in the morning at Recycle-a-Bicycle's Long Island City location. They gladly helped all of the volunteers piece together some last minute bikes and sandwiches, and were off riding down 5th street.

On the first ride of the summer everything went as smoothly as we could have hoped. With more than enough volunteers to marshal the ride we were able to get right to work learning how to spell everyone's names and tape those names on to their helmets. Everyone was excited to be matched up and fitted with a bike-even the bikes with sparkly beads on the spokes found a child ready and willing to ride it down the streets of Brooklyn and Queens.

However before we could even think about popping wheelies or jumping curbs we had to do a safety check. Well, as it turns out we would all have to trade our trick skills for concentration and alertness- making sure that we stayed in a single file line and passed information about potholes and turns down the line. Once all that was cleared up, and the all the brakes and gears tested one last time we were all off bouncing on banana seats and pointing out potholes- and trying hard to maintain a straight line, something not even the cars in NYC seem to be able to do.

After a long, hard, but ultimately invigorating ride up and down the incline of the Pulaski Bridge, our snake-like line made it to Brooklyn. Our first stop was to be a small press conference with Representative Nydia Velazquez. She is introducing new legislation to promote the stocking of healthy foods in Bodegas throughout New York City and eventually the country. As she stood in front of one Brooklyn bodega she explained that the bodega is the most accessible place for most residents both spacially and financially to purchase their food.

Despite the fact that many people live on the food sold in Bodegas, few of them sell fresh fruits and vegetables, or low fat milk. Representative Velazquez is advocating for grants for the bodega owners to first of all purchase the healthy foods from suppliers. She is also predicting that due to the community that surrounds bodegas, that once these healthy foods are brought into low income neighborhoods, there will be more initiative to learn about how to eat well.

We all stood back with our bikes to listen to Representative Velazquez, but soon enough the tv camera spotted our group of kids who chose a healthy and environmentally-friendly mode of transportation that Friday morning. Nicole and Empress, two of the ride participants were interviewed for NY1. Nicole explained to the reporter that she in fact is a vegetarian. Both girls when asked why they thought it was important to eat healthily focused on what foods will do to your body, telling the reporter that a poor diet can lead to many bad health effects including heart disease.

Once all the kids were through with their 15 minutes of fame we all went in and bought our lunch at the bodega and walked a few short blocks to a park to eat our mostly health-concious lunches. We filled ourselves with sandwiches and juice to fuel our ride back to Long Island City-all that food was much cheaper than a tank of gas. We rode back up the dreaded hill on the Pulaski Bridge and back down 5th Street towards the water. We piled up bikes and helmets-exhausted (we rode 25 miles!), but still ready to go even further the next week. See photos of our free summer ride club for youth and see what the kids had to say about Ride Club.