Going Statewide With The Minnesota Cargo Bike Library!

Now known as the Minnesota Cargo Bike Library, let’s check in with Laura Mitchell about what’s new this year!

Links

• Minnesota Cargo Bike Library
• Merchandise (including the opossum shirt!)
• Cyclehoop
• Perennial Cycle
• Opossum in pannier
• Opossum setting off the music
• Katie Jones and Peter Schmitt transporting their newborn in a cargo bike

Attributions

Our theme song is Tanz den Dobberstein, and our interstitial song is Puck’s Blues. Both tracks used by permission of their creator, Erik Brandt. Find out more about his band, The Urban Hillbilly Quartet, on their website.

This episode was produced by Stina Neel, edited by Parker Seaman aka Strongthany, and hosted and transcribed by Ian R Buck. Many thanks to Laura Mitchell for coming on the show! We’re always looking to feature new voices on the show, so if you have ideas for future episodes, drop us a line at [email protected].

Transcript

[00:00:02] Ian: Welcome to the Streets.mn Podcast, the show where we highlight how transportation and land use can make our communities better places. Coming to you from beautiful uptown Minneapolis, Minnesota, I am your host, Ian R. Buck. Listeners will probably remember the episode that we produced last May highlighting the Minneapolis Cargo Bike Library, which was brand new at the time. With the new year comes some pretty massive changes, namely expanding to become the Minnesota Cargo Bike Library. Producer Stina Neel sat down with Laura Mitchell to get all the details.

[00:00:41] Stina: Hi Laura.

[00:00:43] Laura: Hello.

[00:00:43] Stina: Would you like to introduce yourself for folks who may not know?

[00:00:47] Laura: I’m Laura Mitchell and I run the Minnesota Cargo Bike Library.

[00:00:51] Stina: Yes, the MCBL. Now was it always the Minnesota Cargo Bike Library or was it originally Minneapolis and we had a name upgrade pretty recently?

[00:01:00] Laura: The latter. It’s very exciting. We started as Minneapolis Cargo Bike Library because we didn’t dream big enough apparently and thought that Minneapolis was where we would stop, but the demand has been so great and we’ve been lucky to get some additional grant funding and so we recently opened a new location down in Rochester and have some plans to hopefully also get some funding for St. Paul and Duluth as well.

[00:01:21] Stina: Yeah, that was my first question. So for listeners, we talked roughly a year ago, give or take, and so first of all, if you’re listening right now, you need to stop and go listen to that episode first, then come back, or you can be pleasantly surprised if you think you know everything about the Cargo Bike Library so far. But tell us, what are some general updates? What’s happened in the last year?

[00:01:47] Laura: So much has happened. So unfortunately, right after we recorded that episode, we had a pretty devastating theft, which was really intense, but our community, both near and far, really rallied and we were able to get some funding put together that helped us to replace the bikes that were stolen and we got zero dollar deductible insurance, bike insurance on all of our bikes, which is good peace of mind and has helped us to protect our fleet since then, although we’ve been really lucky to not have any other issues. So that was a bummer, but you know, an opportunity for us to learn and grow. And that’s, we’ve really taken the perspective that this is a pilot and we’re continuing to iterate every single year on what we can do better as we continue to scale. So that was a downside. Plus side is we’ve continued to get a ton of support from individuals, from bike shops, from bike brands. And we grew our fleet from three at the beginning of April last year to this year when we opened, we had 15 bikes. So two of those bikes went down to Rochester and then the rest are up here in Minneapolis. We got a grant from the Minneapolis foundation to help us open two more Minneapolis locations, which are still in the works. Things got a little bit delayed with Operation Metro Surge and our attention getting pulled into more important things over the winter. But we’re still working to open another location in South Minneapolis in what’s called the South Side Green Zone, and then also in the North Side Green Zone of Minneapolis. So those are very close to, to being finalized. We’re excited to announce where those locations will be as soon as they’re ready to go. And we have onboarded now, we’re closing up on 160 folks who have joined the cargo bike library. Joining basically means they’ve attended our required, but free one hour in person orientation, where we go over all the safety basics of how to ride a bike for transportation safely in the street or in bike lanes. Uh, we go over helmet fit, locking up a bike, all the things that they need to know to have a successful borrow of one of our cargo bikes. We’ve also had a number of folks go on to purchase their own cargo bikes and e-bikes, which has been really cool to see as well. And just so many great stories of how folks are using these bikes while they’re out and about.

[00:03:52] Stina: So Minneapolis, you have two locations, correct?

[00:03:55] Laura: Two, soon to be four.

[00:03:57] Stina: When did the second location happen? We sort of soft launched it at the end of last year quietly. And this year we, we started the year with that. And so we have two volunteer librarians that run the Brackett Park location, Andy and Zach, and they donate their time to help folks get bikes over there. That’s been hugely successful. And I’m super grateful, especially to Andy, who’s been managing our upright trike from Lectric. That bike in particular gets borrowed by a lot of folks who have mobility needs or who might have some balance issues, um, folks who are older, sometimes feel more comfortable on the trike. And so that one does tend to take a little bit more time and attention to do that overview when someone is picking up the bike during check out to make sure that they have what they need to be successful.

[00:04:38] Stina: And is that Andy as in from Cyclehoop?

[00:04:42] Laura: Yes. Yeah. And Cyclehoop is the, they make the bike hangers that we store, the secure bike storage that we use, um, for all of our locations to actually store our bikes. And so Andy, outside of his role with Cyclehoop as, as paid staff at Cyclehoop, he donates his time to actually manage the library location. He also has been a really great spokesperson to help share the idea of cargo bike libraries around the country. Uh, he had a meeting with some folks in Chicago and it sounds like that might be in the works. Since we opened last year, we’ve also had some friends open a cargo bike library in Washington, DC in Tempe, Arizona. And some other locations are in the works. And so it’s been really cool to see things catch on.

[00:05:18] Stina: Oh, that’s fantastic. And the cargo bike hangers, they look exactly like that sounds, right? There’s a hanger, there’s some sort of locking mechanism, and then you just lift it up kind of like a hatchback and those are at all the cargo bike library locations?

[00:05:35] Laura: Functionally. Yes. And the new ones that we open that, that model of actually being able to store the bikes in a hanger like that, as opposed to in someone’s backyard or in a garage is really beneficial. The theft that we had was to the overflow storage that we were using to a garage, and that was a huge like liability and just insurance kind of nightmare. And so being able to store these bikes in a space that is dedicated storage just for our program keeps things nice and clean and also can make them more accessible. Right now, the hanger that I have at the Linda location that I run does require a key to get in, but Cyclehoop has this really cool app that we’re going to be retrofitting all of our hangers with so that myself and our other volunteer librarians will be able to get in and out of the hanger, just with our smartphones, which will be really nice.

[00:06:14] Stina: And how many volunteers do you have currently? I think we have about eight, but there are five that are really reliable. And that’s, that’s been a piece for the cargo bike library that if anyone out there wants to become a volunteer, I would love to have you and we can find all sorts of ways for folks to help with regardless of your skills or what time you have to commit. But we found that for the librarian work, because we intentionally have so many different models of bikes that all work differently and have different buttons and different quirks to them. It’s helpful to have folks who are in the librarian role really commit to helping throughout the year because that’s a bit of a learning curve for them to get to know each bike so that they then can walk our members through how that bike works at checkout. It’s just harder to kind of drop in and have that knowledge. So the volunteers who really stick with it, my all stars have really donated a lot of their time and and this program relies on them. Like we we very much are a volunteer run program, which our website is in decent shape. We have a kind of fun logo. And so sometimes folks see the program and think that we’re much fancier and more well resourced than we are. But really, it’s just a scrappy and dedicated, passionate group of volunteers who are making this work, along with this really valuable support from Bicycle Alliance of Minnesota.

[00:07:20] Stina: Yeah, I did want to ask about funding. Obviously, it takes quite a bit of funding to make something like this happen. Everything from running the website and getting everything organized for the trainings, other orientation meetings, and then the actual bikes themselves and the hangars and everything. So where has funding historically come from? And is that the same now or different?

[00:07:42] Laura: Last year, we had no funding. So Bicycle Alliance of Minnesota had some they had purchased a number of bikes for another program that they run that’s really cool called the e-bike commuter program. And they got some rewards with Aventon, the bike manufacturer that makes those bikes. And so they were able to purchase our first two electric cargo bikes just with rewards that they had with that manufacturer. And then Cyclehoop was very generous and gave us our first hanger. And so we ran last year with almost no budget. We tried to fix bikes ourselves when some repairs came up. Bicycle Alliance of Minnesota covered a lot of those, but we did not have a dedicated budget. This year, thanks to the Minneapolis Foundation Grant, we do have a budget that is able to cover these two additional hangars that we’ll get for the two more Minneapolis locations. It covers bike insurance, bike repairs, and a little bit some stipends for some volunteer time, which has been really helpful too. And then Lyndale Neighborhood Association has been donating their office space for us to use for orientation. They let us use their copy machine. We’re getting a lot of favors pulled in and then we’ve continued to benefit from really generous bike manufacturers and bike shops. And then as I mentioned, individual just Minneapolis residents who have electric cargo bikes that they’re not using as often and just want to find a new home for them. So we’ve been really lucky to be able to, we have not actually paid for any of the bikes that we’ve gotten except for those ones that BikeMN paid for with those rewards. So that’s helped to keep our costs really low.

[00:09:03] Stina: And some private donors too, right? Some individual just citizens who care, bike nerds from all over the country, just making good things happen.

[00:09:12] Laura: Absolutely. Yeah. So especially after our theft last year, we had a lot of donations and then we still, we sell merch on our website that folks have been buying and then we get some donations. There’s even, we have one person who is this sustaining donor of the Cargo Bike Library, which makes me very happy. So folks are being really generous to help support the program.

[00:09:30] Stina: So how did Rochester come to be? I think the last time we talked, there were hopes. Luckily we have some really good connections with We Bike Rochester. I’m sure Michael with Bike MN was a helper, but how did that come to be and when did that all, when did it all happen?

[00:09:45] Laura: First and foremost, I have to say we didn’t go to Rochester instead of St. Paul because we wanted to have any beef with St. Paul. That is not the case. I love my friends in St. Paul. I would have loved to have St. Paul be our second location, but we didn’t have funding for that. In the case of Rochester, there was a grant opportunity that came up that we were able to get that is paying for the hangar and for some volunteer time, also for the bike insurance and repairs. And so we sort of went to where the money was that opportunity came about through that grant funding. And then also through, as you named Michael at BikeMN and the other BikeMN… BikeMN really has a presence in Rochester and a lot of connections and there’s a lot of interest in biking more in Rochester, the Mayo Clinic and some other folks down there have been working to try to find ways to make biking as transportation more possible for more folks. And so it felt like a natural place for us to start. And then BikeMN also has two paid staff members down there who are the primary staffing for that library location as it gets off the ground. So that is a huge peace of mind too, just to have staff in place to help run it.

[00:10:44] Stina: So when there was just the one location and it was close to where you live and it was easy for you or other volunteers locally to help people check out bikes, check them back in, do all of that. But when obviously you’re not going down to Rochester every week and then the other locations. So how has scheduling changed? Are all the locations, is it all the same day? Is check in, check out day? What does that look like?

[00:11:13] Laura: Yeah, that’s something that we’re learning and figuring out as we go. The Rochester schedule is different from the Minneapolis locations because it had to fit the schedule of the folks who are running the library down there. And then the Minneapolis locations both have checkout on Thursday nights, makes it easier so that folks here kind of know what the schedule is. And then the return process for the two different locations actually is different because I need a little bit longer to turn bikes over than the Brackett folks are doing. And so we have all that information on our website, but it is a little bit of a makeshift thing that we’re figuring out as we go to figure out what schedules work the best. For the most part, we try to make sure that all of the locations have schedules that allow our borrowers to have the bikes both on weekdays and weekends to have a mix of being able to experience it during whatever their weekday lives look like, which might include school or work or whatever. And then also have the time on weekends to explore more and take trips that they might not be as likely to do during the week. So the schedules are different, but we do try to hold that true across all of them.

[00:12:08] Stina: What is the mix currently of the different types of cargo bikes? So just for listeners who may not be ultra familiar with the different styles of cargo bikes. I’m going to run through a few of them. Right. A long tail. It’s exactly what it sounds like is usually seats for kids or sometimes another adult or just cargo space in the back. There’s what I call the front loaders usually have a kind of a big shelf in the front, but still two wheels, like a bike. Then the, what I call bucket bikes more like a bakfiets style. Is that how I say bakfiets? Um, there’s a bucket in the front and that’s where the cargo or the peoples or the dogs go. Um, some have three wheels, some have two wheels. What, what kind of bikes are you all offering this year?

[00:12:56] Laura: It would be a really funny and boring for most folks party game for me to try to list all of our bikes out. I’m not going to do that, but I will say we do have majority long tails. Within the long tail category, there are some long tails that are shorter than others and we call those mid tails. So we have mostly long tails, a couple mid tails. And then this spring we got an Urban Arrow from Perennial and Gazelle, which is the parent company of Urban Arrow. That’s been huge and was in high demand, like hugely requested last year that folks wanted to have an Urban Arrow. So we’re really grateful to have add that to the library. And then we also have continued with our Bunch bike, which is that trike format with the big bucket in the front and three wheels. Those, the front loaders… interestingly enough, last year, our long tails were by far the most popular. And then once we got the bunch bike added to the fleet that started to, it was booked solidly the rest of the year, but the long tails were continuing to get a lot of bookings this year. The front loaders, both the Urban Arrow and the Bunch bike have been by far the most in demand. And sometimes we’ve had a few weeks here and there where a long tail has just sat and not been borrowed, which is kind of shocking to me. Obviously I don’t know all the reasons behind that. People’s schedules and you know, whatever else, but I do think there’s some interesting shift potentially happening, at least with the folks who are part of the Cargo Bike Library where I think in the past, when cargo bikes were a little bit more novel and new and people didn’t know about them, the cost of a front loader, which can be substantially more than a long tail, sometimes three to four times more expensive or more folks were turned off by that price and didn’t necessarily see the value in spending $6,000 plus on a cargo bike. I think they’re starting to get more popular and more in use. Folks are seeing them and especially people who are getting rid of a car and replacing it with a cargo bike, which I’m starting to hear more and more when we do introductions during our orientations and hearing just where folks are at those folks are seeing more of the value and more interested in those front loader bikes, which I personally have one and see huge value in being able to just like throw all your stuff in the bike and not have to worry about it, how you’re perfectly packing in your panniers and things. We have a huge variety of bike, but definitely the two front loaders that we have are in highest demand this year.

[00:14:56] Stina: And on the website, which is in the show notes, does that have, you know, kind of a little name and profile for all of the bikes?

[00:15:02] Laura: It does. If you click in we now we’ve adjusted the website a little bit and so it has branches. So you click into the Minneapolis branches and you click in and then you can see which bikes are at each location and yeah, each bike has information on it as far as like the motor, the mid-driver, or a hub drive, the payload capacity and how much weight it can actually hold, how fast it can go, the typical range on the battery. So we try to include all that information and a photo as well so that we do not expect folks when they come into the library to be experts on all of these bikes. We want to help help them up that learning curve. And one way that we do that is share all that information straightforward so that they don’t have to go Googling to try to figure out what bike might fit my needs and my family and my schedule and all that kind of stuff.

[00:15:41] Stina: Yeah, because if you’re I don’t know, trying to put a couple of Great Danes on a on a bike…

[00:15:45] Laura: You don’t want a long tail.

[00:15:45] Stina: Like, no, it’s going to be a little different. And then some people are really particular about like, do I want it to be a mid-drive versus a hub drive?

[00:15:52] Laura: Yeah, they feel different when you ride them. And a lot of folks, I would say the the vast majority of folks who come into the library, especially, you know, when we opened last year in like April, it was in May, there was a lot of bikey people who just weren’t yet into cargo bikes, but they knew a lot of things about bikes. And since then, we’ve expanded much more into folks who are not necessarily bikey people. This for many folks, the Cargo Bike Library is their entry point into biking for transportation. And so it’s really helpful, I think, to have the mix of bikes so that they can test out and actually feel for themselves what a hub drive feels like versus what a mid-drive feels like, what a long tail feels like versus what a front loader feels like so that they can make an informed choice if they’re going to buy one for themselves.

[00:16:31] Stina: So I know we had talked about a rather terrifying break in, right? But we also had kind of we had a little bit of a you had a silly visitor, too. Do you mind telling that story on mic?

[00:16:43] Laura: Yes, it’s it’s all that I talked about for like a week and a half. And my phone started giving me targeted ads with this critter because I was typing this name into my phone so much. So I, our, my family’s garage has a lot of our personal bikes in it and occasionally has like one or two Cargo Bike Library bikes in it. I went out to the garage to grab my pannier to put on one of my bikes and go run an errand. And I looked into the bag and there was something that I did not put there in there, which was a juvenile opossum munching on a Clif Bar that I leave in there for if I get super hungry while I’m out in a ride and need a snack. It was so adorable. I as soon as I spotted it, I raced back into my house to grab my wife, but I didn’t want to spoil the surprise for her. So I probably had the most wild look on my face when I was like, “you need to come out to the garage right now.” And she raced out and we got to admire the cute little critter. And conveniently, since it had squirreled itself into a pouch that was hanging on the wall, I just grabbed the handle of my pannier, took the little critter out into my yard, set the bag on the ground and I gave it some space. It actually was, I’ve learned so much about opossums through this experience that I didn’t know. And they really are not aggressive unless they’re really cornered. This one did not play dead or do anything. He just was kind of hanging out in my bag and munching on that Clif Bar. So I put the bag on the ground and I walked away. I went and did my errand and I came back and it was gone. I was like, OK, that was a really cute story. I had a really cute video of me walking up and seeing the opossum. And so I shared that online and I thought that was the end of things. But after that night, the next two mornings in a row, we have a whole alarm system in our garage now because of those thefts. And part of the alarm system is an Apple HomePod speaker. And the next two mornings, when we walked into our garage, there was rock music that we did not put on blasting at the top volume in our garage, which was very strange. But, you know, our houses, my wife has a whole like smart home system set up and we’re like maybe the kids had tried to play music on a speaker and it accidentally played in the garage like we didn’t know. And then one of those nights I walked into the garage again to grab a bike to go on an errand and I saw an opossum. I don’t actually know if it was the same one or if it’s another juvenile one. Like it could be that we have a whole litter of opossums and one of them was still in the garage and I got the other one out. Who can say for sure I did not tag this wildlife? I don’t know. But I saw another opossum of the same age. It was a little bit more wiry looking. I don’t know if it was because it was partying so much or if it was a different opossum. And so then I told my wife like I actually wonder if what happened is that this opossum somehow triggered the music to play. We also have a video camera in our garage and my wife pulled up the video feed and we got the most delightful videos of this opossum walking over our workbench that has the speaker on it and Siri saying to the opossum like “you got it a playlist just for you coming right up.” And then We Are Scientists, a band, starts blaring and the opossum, if you Google, “how do I get an opossum out of my garage?” It says to play loud music and keep the garage door open. And I was like, but what if the opossum likes the loud music? Because in this video, this opossum is a little bit weirded out by it, but like kind of turns around and looks at it. But it just keeps hanging out right where the speaker is kind of jamming out. And then the Smiths starts playing and this opossum, one of the Cargo Bike Library bikes was right next to the workbench, a long tail. And the opossum turned a kind of creepy sound of a Morrissey song, of a Smiths song. The opossum is like climbing up the seat post underneath the saddle of a bike and then sits on the seat and then climbs onto the like rear storage area on the bars. At one point, it like hangs by its tail on the side of the bike. It was so stinking cute. It also then was climbing on our family’s Bunch bike on the corners. And one of our kids had left a helmet on the bench on the inside and the opossum got into the helmet. And of course, an upside down helmet is wobbly, but a little opossum doesn’t know that. And so it crawled into the helmet and then probably took a step in the whole helmet and the opossum fell into the bottom of the Bunch bike. So it was just so stinking cute. I shared the videos online and someone locally created a logo with an opossum on the rear area of a long tail, just like this opossum was doing hanging out. And as many of us know, opossum mamas carry their opossum babies on their backs. And so the logo has an opossum mama with little babies on its back and it’s on the back of a long tail. And it’s so cute. And it’s in our merch store now. And we’ve actually sold T-shirts all across the country. It’s fantastic.

[00:21:09] Stina: Including to me! I bought one that’s white so that I can tie-dye it. Mine is extra custom and I am so excited. You know, we’ve had a bunch of wildlife episodes. “A bunch.” We’ve had a couple of them. Maybe we’ll talk to a possum expert. That’d be quite fun.

[00:21:26] Laura: They’re amazing.

[00:21:27] Stina: They’re wonderful creatures. I love everything about them.

[00:21:31] Laura: The little one didn’t even pee or poop in my bag, didn’t chew it. It was so respectful. Like it was so sweet. But they apparently only lived two years, which I think is so sad. So, yeah, learn more facts. I would I would listen to an opossum episode.

[00:21:44] Stina: And they eat ticks. They eat so many ticks. And anyone in Minnesota knows we got plenty of ticks.

[00:21:51] Laura: And they don’t tend to have rabies because I guess their body temperature is too low for the rabies to survive.

[00:21:56] Stina: And I love their toothy little smile.

[00:21:58] Laura: Yeah, amazing animals.

[00:22:00] Stina: But yes, you can still find those in the merch store. And they’re pretty incredible shirts. And I love them. And they have adult sizes and kids sizes. What do you think has been one of the biggest surprises in the past year? Or even in the past two years? You can go all the way back.

[00:22:17] Laura: I have been just so pleasantly surprised by the reception of this program first and foremost when I pitched it to BikeMN. I sort of expected that maybe it would last like a year, maybe two years. Maybe we could help like 50 or 100 people. But the reality is that we I don’t know if we ever will meet demand. The demand is clearly so high that I now am very much in a position where I want to scale and grow this program as much as we can. But I also think we need to have additional ways for folks to access bikes like this. Like if Minneapolis, for example, does get Nice Ride or another bike share back in place, it would be incredible for us to have cargo bikes as a component of that. I would love for more bike shops to offer bike loans. I would love for on-demand paid bike rentals like what CargoB does out in Boston, where they have Urban Arrows that folks can, just like what you do with Lime Bikes, use an app, find a bike, pay for it, hop on it, go use it, drop it back off. I think we need way, way, way more access to cargo bikes from lots of different vantage points. However, from the Cargo Bike Library, I’ve been really impressed at how much we’ve been able to grow the program. I didn’t I never anticipated that it’d be beyond just Lyndale for our first location. I didn’t think that we’d have multiple locations. I certainly never imagined that we would go into other cities across the state. So that’s been really fantastic. I also did not anticipate or predict how many folks would have their entry point into e-bikes generally be through the Cargo Bike Library. Actually, in the last week, we had two borrowers who borrowed very big electric cargo bikes. That was their first time using an e-bike period. They loved the experience, but for their use case, they actually decided they don’t need a cargo bike, but they went on to buy just a more commuter style e-bike. And so that’s been really cool to see that that’s been an entry point for folks. Obviously, anyone can just go into a bike shop and test out an e-bike, but you don’t really know what you’re getting into until you have a chance to actually use it for a longer period of time. So that’s been pretty incredible and pretty exciting. And then just all the different use cases that folks have had continue to surprise and delight me. The most recent one this last week, if you’re on Blue Sky and you follow the little plant stand library, there’s someone in Minneapolis who builds plant stands across the city and then puts little plants in them and then you can walk by and pick up a little plant and come bring it to your home and plant it in your garden, on your balcony, whatever the case may be. That person borrowed one of our bikes this last week to get materials around the city to build some more plant stands and fill them with plants. And so I just think there’s, there’s such an easy connection between oftentimes folks who bike for transportation or are interested in bikes are doing other things that are good for the community. And so they can layer the bikes into whatever other volunteer efforts they’re doing. We had another person a couple of weeks ago use the Urban Arrow to go to Costco to pick up a bunch of donations and drop them off at the Joyce Food Shelf. Like people are just so good and doing such good things with these cargo bikes, in addition to just all the typical things of getting their own life stuff done, getting kids to school, getting adults around, you know, picking up groceries, all sorts of things.

[00:25:14] Stina: Yeah, we’ve seen, let’s see, friends of the pod, Jason and Regina. They had a family member come visit and they got to take her to all of their favorite places in the Bunch bike. We’ve seen… the one that Parker borrowed that wasn’t directly from…

[00:25:31] Ian: That was directly from Luke at Perennial.

[00:25:37] Laura: But that’s part of it, too, like being able to borrow bikes from bike shops, right, other places means that the Cargo Bike Library doesn’t in our like strap budget and volunteer stuff, like we’re not going to be able to meet all the needs. And so I love being able to see the other ways that folks are borrowing bikes and also just borrowing bikes from each other. You know, I’m hearing about a lot more friends who have cargo bikes and I’m sure loaning them out to other friends to try them out. And I think that direct person to person borrow is huge, too.

[00:26:01] Stina: Like Baby Hans. That’s borrowed borrowed Urban Arrow.

[00:26:07] Laura: Yep, exactly.

[00:26:08] Stina: That Katie and Peter get to take Baby Hans around in take him home from the hospital after birth.

[00:26:14] Laura: And then they went on to buy their own. So now they have Urban Arrow too.

[00:26:18] Stina: And trying to get another one. Oh, the artist in Northeast.

[00:26:23] Laura: Yep. Yeah. So for the second year in a row, she borrowed a cargo bike last year. She borrowed a long tail. And I was excited this year that we had the Urban Arrow, which was a little bit easier to fit all the art supplies in and not have to use so many bungee cords. And yeah, she had a great experience bringing her art up to Art-a-Whirl. We also had someone who had a friend who had a workplace injury and actually was paraplegic, who was able to get into the Bunch bike. And she was riding her friend around with her son in the front of the Bunch bike. And they went for a picnic, I think, near Stone Arch or somewhere that is not actually accessible by car. And this friend was able to just have a lovely experience and outing with his family that he hadn’t been able to do since he hadn’t been able to ride bikes after his injury. So there’s some incredible stories. There was a funny experience at Open Streets Lyndale. Our Bunch bike was out on loan that week, and it has… the Bunch bike is one of the most noticeable bikes, both because it’s not as common in Minneapolis right now. It’s the trike format where there’s two wheels in the front and the big bucket. And we have a big teal panel on the front that has our logo and QR code and stuff. And the folks who were borrowing that bike went to Open Streets, which we also were tabling at for the Cargo Bike Library. And they rode by and said that they kept getting stopped by people asking about the Cargo Bike Library. And so my volunteer who was working at the table gave them a bunch of flyers. And then they just continued while they were there with their family enjoying the day. They also were doing sort of like ad hoc marketing for us to be able to hand out the flyers to everyone who stopped them to ask, which was so cool.

[00:27:47] Stina: How do we get the Cargo Bike Library to be at the Cat Tour next year? The the very famous Wedge Live Cat Tour.

[00:27:58] Laura: That would be incredible. John borrowed a bike to do an on bike interview with Councilmember Aisha Chughtai last year, which was awesome. And he continues to promote the Cargo Bike Library on Wedge Live podcast, which is great. And jokes that they’re sponsored by us. We have not given him any money to say that, but we did give him the bike, which is so sweet. Yeah, it would be incredible to be at the Cat Tour and at like any and every Minneapolis based thing. The challenge that I run into is that bike is booked every single week. And so in order to have it at those events, I either have to have someone who’s willing to go to those events or have more bikes so that we can have things at places. Although the I am doing that. I don’t like to have the bikes out of rotation and not available to our members for any length of time. But I am making an exception to that because we actually got invited to have a bike at the Eco Experience building at the State Fair. So we will have our bunch bike on display in that building during the state fair, which will be very exciting.

[00:28:52] Stina: So people can go to the State Fair and meet a bike celebrity. Or celebrity bike.

[00:28:58] Laura: Yeah, we want a volunteer there the whole time, but there will be some volunteers there. And then, yeah, certainly they can check out the bike. And I think Perennial will have an Urban Arrow there, too. So lots of cool things to check out in that building.

[00:29:08] Stina: What do you think has been the biggest challenge in the expanse from year one to year two?

[00:29:15] Laura: All of the logistics involved with scaling. So the the systems that we had in place when it was just one library and three bikes and mostly me doing everything worked. But then we had to figure out how to scale all of that stuff across multiple locations. The biggest logistical challenge right now is because we have one booking platform that, thank you to my wife, is kind of a it’s it’s fully, fully, fully customized in ways that we I almost sometimes feel like we’re going to break we’re like very edge use case of the platform that we’re on. And so we’re looking into some additional softwares that we might be able to use last year. But the platform that we’re using is not necessarily designed for what we’re using it for. And so we’ve had to really think through how do we make sure that all the librarians have access to the information that they need to know? How do we make sure we know when bikes are coming in, when they’re going out? How do we get them repaired? Like if a mechanical issue comes up, that can be a major headache. If there’s any mobile bike mechanics who service e-bikes, who’d be willing to like have some sort of situation with us, where they come once a week or every two weeks to do a once over on our fleet and be available for those sorts of repairs. That would be huge. We haven’t gotten to that point yet. And we’re lucky to like have pretty minor issues with serviceability. And we haven’t had that many things break. But just this last week, I noticed the challenge sometimes of having folks who are not familiar with bikes using them is they something might break and they might not notice it. And so one of our bikes came back and everything looked fine to me. But it wasn’t until I had the bike on a perfectly flat surface, that I noticed that the kickstand was actually wobbly and it somehow had gotten bent and needed a fully new kickstand. So I had to order that part and get that replaced. It was an easy replacement. But it’s like I ask all of our borrowers to flag for me. Was there anything weird mechanically that came up and they don’t always know. And so that’s where our librarians play a huge role in being able to do that once over on the bikes when they come back in from check in. And then it’s sort of if any issues come up, then it’s sort of a scramble in those like one and a half day that I have between bikes coming in and bikes going out again to be like, can I get this fixed that quickly if something comes up? Sometimes we have really kind bike shops. Perennial just did us a huge favor this last week and got us in for a pretty quick turnaround, same day repair. So we were able to get that bike back out to the person who was waiting to borrow it the next week. So that’s been a little bit of a challenge, I think, just ongoing logistics as we continue to scale. We’ll have to figure out it’s sort of like the franchise approach, like what’s going to be the same at the locations and what’s going to be different and how do we decide what those things are is going to be a challenge moving forward. Also, continuing to get funding like our Minneapolis Foundation grant only goes through the end of this year. We don’t technically have funding to run the program next year. And so we have some applications out and are hoping to hear back. But if we don’t have funding, I don’t know how much we we could do the program, because again, we have really generous volunteers who are volunteering their time. But there are true monetary costs of this program. So if anyone knows of additional grants, if anyone wants to donate that, that we really, really stretch those resources incredibly far for this program.

[00:32:18] Stina: That reminds me to talk to you after this. My coworker had some thoughts that I have to look up.

[00:32:27] Laura: Amazing.

[00:32:28] Stina: So I think he knows some grants locally with county and state funding that might be. And maybe you already know about that.

[00:32:35] Laura: Well, and that’s actually been a huge benefit. Like if anyone is listening and doesn’t live… Well, if anyone’s listening and doesn’t live in Minnesota and wants to do something like this, this is not proprietary stuff. You can go start your own library whenever you want to and however you want to. But I’ve noticed that as some other libraries have gotten off the ground in other locations, some are run as their own nonprofit. Like they actually create a nonprofit for the bike library. Others do what we did where we joined an existing nonprofit. Ours is BikeMN. And in our case, there’s, you know, pros and cons and challenges and benefits to each of them. But I think in our case, we’ve really benefited from having BikeMN because they are a longstanding organization that’s been around for like 17 years or whatever. They are well trusted in this space. They know a lot about the grants that are available and they’re able to apply for those and have the respect, I think, throughout the process. They’re they’re a known entity to a lot of these grant makers. And so I’m hoping that we have a really, really big ask out that if we get it would be St. Paul and Duluth. We should hear back on that in August. I’m hoping that the fact that it’s BikeMN applying for it on behalf of Minnesota Cargo Bike Library, that that might give us a little bit of an advantage, but we’ll see.

[00:33:42] Stina: That would be pretty pretty incredible. Yeah, St. Paul and Duluth. Yeah, my last question was what’s next? So what’s next? Is Duluth possible? St. Paul possible? And and then securing funding for next year.

[00:34:00] Laura: Dream dream case, if we got enough funding together, I would love to have enough money to pay someone at least a partial like position, you know, halftime or something to run this as we grow. It has taken up the admin side of things is just a lot more of a beast with the program. And so it would be huge for sustainability and like to prevent burnout, to be able to actually pay someone a decent wage to do this work. And I think that would set us up well to then be able to scale better because we’d have someone really, really focused on this work. So continuing to get the grant funding, continuing to expand, continuing to refine our process. This year, we have a member survey that we send to everyone after each time they borrow a bike. And that’s been incredibly helpful to collect the data on how are they using the bikes? What are they finding helpful? How many trips are they taking? Because we’re just collecting the mileage from the odometers that the bikes already have built into them. And I think that data we collected that data last year in a slightly different way. I think it’s going to be more comprehensive the way that we’re collecting it this year. And I’m hopeful that that will set us up to not only be able to qualify for more grants and show that this program really is making an impact, but help to inspire other places, municipalities, counties, anyone who can take this kind of work on. Hopkins actually has been looking at starting their own bike library, e-bike library. So I hope to both improve our own systems and serve more folks, but also inspire others. We really want to put together sort of like a playbook that we’d be able to offer to folks who are interested in doing this in their own area to be able to share the hundreds of lessons learned that we have from the last year and a half. So that that would be my hope is just to continue to to grow and inspire and support others to do the same.

[00:35:40] Stina: Excellent. Yeah, there’s something special about Minnesotans where like we’re not gatekeepers. That’s something huge that I learned here is that everyone shares knowledge and experience because they’re like, “well, things are wonderful here. I want everyone to have the wonderful experience we have here.” And I think you in the Cargo Bike Library are especially like pretty shining stars of that.

[00:36:04] Laura: And I’m I’m really grateful. The NACTO Conference was obviously here in May. And I did find that conference itself, the organizers to be a little bit gatekeeping. But then our city staff opened those gates because they wanted us to be featured. And so they found ways that the Cargo Bike Library could be a part of NACTO for some of the field trips and things that they were taking. So that was really exciting to be able to talk to folks who were from all over the country visiting Minneapolis. And we got a lot of really positive reception from from the attendees of the conference when we were having those conversations. And then this fall, we’re going to be having the Safe Routes to School Conference is is in Minneapolis in October. And I actually have sort of separate from the Cargo Bike Library. I submitted a proposal on the overlap between bike like Safe Routes to School work and mutual aid, because I saw at my kid’s school where I ran a Safe Routes to School grant last year that the same parents and families who had been involved in that work were the foundation for us to grow the mutual aid work. And so I’m excited to talk about sort of that crossover and then, you know, continue to to pollinate the idea of cargo bike libraries and bikes and just the the overlap between doing good work and community and using bikes for social change.

[00:37:16] Stina: So a question that Ian brought up is what is the possibility of things like trailers, right? Like I have a Burley trailer. Ian has a flatbed trailer. Our friends Katie Jones and Peter Schmitt have a really long, like hardcore trailer. That thing that I think can hold several adults or a whole bunch of computer monitors for a teacher teaching a special summer class. So any thoughts on that, either for us or for other cities or folks who want to get a similar program?

[00:37:52] Laura: Yes, I think for the cargo bike library to take that on, the biggest logistical hurdle would be storage for things like that. We’re already really tight on storage for bikes that we would need to have access to a place where things like that could be stored. But we actually, when we first launched the program, had a number of people who have both Burley trailers and those more heavy duty trailers reach out to say, I’d be willing to borrow my trailer out to someone. And at the time and still right now, I don’t really know how the liability stuff would work if we had like individual people loaning to us and then us loaning out to others. So I haven’t wanted to touch that quite yet, but I do think there is a huge potential. A cargo bike is not the solution for every person or every situation or every trip. And so to be able to show, you know, sometimes you might want a cargo bike, sometimes you might want a Burley trailer, sometimes you might want a much bigger trailer. To be able to have those options available for folks, I think would be huge. I think about the tool libraries that we have and how they have just every sort of type of tool. I would love to have I don’t know if it’s the role the Cargo Bike Library will play or if it’s someone else could play that role, but to have a space where I wish we had a folding bike library. I wish we had a Dutch bike library. I wish we had a trailer library. I wish that we had little how do you say it? Kei trucks,

[00:38:59] Stina: Oh, yeah, tiny trucks.

[00:39:00] Laura: I wish every neighborhood could have one of those and just rent it out when you need it. I think there’s so much potential for sharing because not especially for things like that, not everyone is going to be using something like that every day. And so the more that we can share that, the less that individual people have to own. So I would love to see something like that happen at some point, but we don’t have plans for it quite yet.

[00:39:19] Stina: I think about like for my household and for Ian’s household, like borrowing a electric cargo bike is not really feasible for us just from a storage perspective, right? Like I’m not carrying that up the stairs, but it’s very easy for me to carry a little aluminum trailer upstairs. And so I think that that could be. The the gateway for people going from, you know, having multiple cars to or car light or we’re going car free.

[00:39:48] Laura: Yeah, and I think I think it’s Montreal that has a bike share where they do have trailers that go on to the bike share bikes. That is super cool because if you know anything about trailers, sometimes the adapters that the trailers hook onto your bike can be a little bit of a headache and would be probably a little bit of a headache in a share situation because you’d have to make sure that whatever bike the person is using actually has the correct attachment point. But I think if we can get this new bike share back, that could be huge to have a system where you have a bike that you borrow and if you need a trailer, you just borrow the trailer that easily connects to that bike. I also have seen one of our cargo bike library volunteers is on his honeymoon in Italy and he sent a Lime bike that had a space for a passenger on the back, which I’ve never seen in the US before. I don’t know if we ever will see in the US because we are very quick to sue anyone for anything that I feel like people are a little bit more nervous about adding passengers. But I actually just saw someone riding a Lime bike on the Greenway the other day with two adults on it, one riding on the seat and the other riding on the back, which is definitely not made for that. So I’m like the interest is there. The demand is there. And I think the more that we can give folks access to these tools that will help them replace more car trips, the better for all of us.

[00:41:01] Stina: It reminds me of, I mean, fairly often you see the Lime scooters with two people on them, but then we saw the Lime scooters with the three guys.

[00:41:10] Laura: They were having such a good time. I loved it.

[00:41:13] Stina: So yes, people yearn for community and they yearn for traveling together in non-car ways.

[00:41:21] Laura: Well, and we actually we get a huge number of emails from folks who are visiting Minneapolis on vacation who want to borrow a bike, which we are not set up to do for a variety of reasons. But like there’s demand there for folks who want to see your beautiful city. Oftentimes people are emailing saying “I’m thinking about moving to Minneapolis and I want to experience the bike infrastructure firsthand.” And so I feel like this is something that the city or Met Council or someone can step up and and meet this need. And it might it likely would result in us having more folks moving here, more folks spending money here on vacation, all those sorts of things. And it’s just a win-win

[00:41:53] Stina: Ian, a tandem library! And it comes with a therapist, too, if you need that after the ride is over.

[00:42:02] Laura: And and adaptive bikes, like we used to have a nonprofit that had a ton of adaptive bikes. They since have closed. Some of their bikes went to Minneapolis Public Schools. But I just there’s so many cool options out there. And I hope that we can continue to get more organized on ways to share those.

[00:42:16] Stina: Well, Laura Mitchell, thank you so much for stopping by telling us about year two and beyond for the Minnesota Cargo Bike Library. Any closing thoughts, anything? Where can folks find you?

[00:42:30] Laura: MCBL.bike is our website.

[00:42:33] Stina: Incredible.

[00:42:34] Laura: And you can also follow us. I’m the only one running our social media for the most part right now, although BikeMN staff are starting to help me, which is huge. I’m so grateful for. For the most part, we are posting more often on Blue Sky, but we’re also active on Instagram. I think we have a Facebook account, LinkedIn, all those places. And subscribe to our newsletter. That’s actually the best way to follow along. I try to include anything and everything that’s going on in our monthly newsletter, which goes out on the 15th of each month. So if you haven’t subscribed to that, go to our website. And then in the bottom, it has a little subscribe button. You can click there.

[00:43:03] Stina: And check out the donation page.

[00:43:04] Laura: And get an opossum t-shirt and be cool like all the cool kids.

[00:43:08] Stina: Yes.

[00:43:09] Laura: My favorite thing is going to be that t-shirt is so weird to try to explain. So I can’t wait to hear how people explain it when someone comes up to me like, what is that? And then they explain the Cargo Bike Library. OK, why is there an opossum on it? Well, Laura, who’s Laura? I had her garage broken into by an opossum. Like it’s I can’t wait.

[00:43:27] Stina: I think the I think the opossum is a perfect a perfect little cargo cargo critter.

[00:43:33] Laura: I I had one person ask if we could keep it as a pet. Apparently they are. It’s illegal, first of all, and they really are not well suited to be pets. But it is a really cute image that if I could have just had that little opossum stay in my pannier and put it on my bike and rode around with an opossum, I think that would have been adorable.

[00:43:48] Stina: It sounds like we need to get a stuffy version. A little stuffy with a helmet. Oh, someone out there, the crocheters. Get the crocheters on it immediately.

[00:44:00] Ian: Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Streets.mn Podcast. The show is released under a creative comments, attribution, non-commercial, non-derivative license. So feel free to republish the episode as long as you are not altering it and you are not profiting from it. The music in this episode is by Erik Brandt in the Urban Hillbilly Quartet. This episode was produced by Stina Neal, edited by Parker Seaman, aka Strongthany, and was hosted and transcribed by me, Ian R. Buck. We’re always looking to feature new voices on the Streets.mn Podcast, so if you have ideas for future episodes, drop us a line at [[email protected]] Streets.mn is a community publication and relies on contributions from audience members like you. If you can make a one time or recurring donation, you can find more information about doing so at [https://streets.mn/donate] Find other listeners and discuss this episode on your favorite social media platform using the hashtag #StreetsMNPodcast. Until next time, take care.