Andrew Kerley, Executive Editor
There is a cozy little nook on Broad Street that feels like an oasis in the middle of one of the busiest, loudest roads in Richmond — a place where the VCU community can receive a service like no other.
RamBikes is the university’s one-stop shop for bike rental and repair, and it is completely free for students, faculty and staff.
People who walk into RamBikes are greeted by a lived-in atmosphere full of distractions. Their quaint coffee table is littered with zines and free spoke cards to stick in bike wheels. The fluorescent lights are blocked out by drapes clad with forest designs only seen otherwise in elementary school science classrooms.
The history book “Lesbian and Gay Richmond” sits on a cabinet, just next to their GRTC bus map and “PROTECT TRANS KIDS” posters. On their bulletin board is a community fridge map and volunteer information for Food Not Bombs. A standout trinket is the RamBikes croaking frog güiro, a wooden instrument that blends seamlessly with the clicks and ticks that come out of the workshop.
Sera Erickson, the sustainable transportation manager for VCU, mans the front desk. She dons a friendly face and a pair of wrench earrings throughout the day as her employees work through bike after bike.
RamBikes mechanics are known among students for not only fixing customers’ problems, but also discovering long lists of additional issues they would have never noticed. Customers who do not take care of their bikes may be met with gentle scoldings akin to concerned parents. Greasing your chain, keeping your tires full of air and using a rain cover are absolute musts.
Third-year biology student Thomas Karikari used RamBikes for the first time this semester. He came in to fix a flat tire, but the good folk at RamBikes found problems with his bike’s gear shifting and brake.
“They were chill about everything, y’know? I walked in, they helped me, even showed me how to pump a bike tire, which was really nice. They even cleaned the bike cause it was really dusty,” Karikari said. “They get stuff done right away too, you don’t gotta wait a whole week.”
RamBikes repaired roughly 704 bikes in the shop last academic year, as well as 22 bikes while tabling around campus, according to Erickson. They also rented bikes 788 times and held 16 workshops for 96 total attendees.
Rooted in service
Erickson has been with RamBikes since 2017, but before that she was a VCU undergraduate student in the late 2000s she said. Erickson studied sociology. Both her parents were social workers, which instilled a drive within her at a young age to better society.
While in school, Erickson was active in Students for a Democratic Society, a student activist organization that has waxed and waned out of the American limelight for decades with anti-war protests.
VCU SDS members joined tens of thousands in Washington to protest the Iraq War in 2007, according to The Commonwealth Times archives. They also protested the closure of a VCU resource center for victims of sexual abuse.
Erickson worked in the nonprofit world after graduating but eventually had to leave because she found the work grueling, as many nonprofits end up running themselves like businesses rather than services, she said.
Erickson later took a role at Rag & Bones — a bicycle cooperative that provides all sorts of services to Richmonders such as bike repairs, earn-a-bike programs and summer camps for kids. The collective is more akin to “mutual aid,” she said.
“Charity is like, ‘oh, you’re worse off than me, I’m just gonna keep giving you stuff.’ It’s like a pipeline that only goes one way, but mutual aid is more like a circular thing,” Erickson said. “Usually when you teach something to somebody, they teach it to somebody else.”
Rag & Bones is still a nonprofit. Erickson is technically their director, though she prefers not to be referred to as such because hierarchy is not their style.
“Trying to have a little bit more of a collective decision-making process, or discussions that value everyone’s opinion at a similar level, usually produces better things, ideas, experiences,” Erickson said.
Branching out
Erickson requires every RamBikes employee to carry a similar dedication to public service. Many shop mechanics are work-study students majoring in fields that funnel them right back into the Richmond community.
“I think that, through this opportunity to work on bikes like this, and not through a retail shop, people can see the value and the effect that it has on folks to teach them something about a bike,” Erickson said.
Just about every bike store, service and organization in the city has been touched by a former RamBikes employee. Brantley Tyndall, RamBikes’ founder, is the director of the prominent organization Bike Walk RVA.
Current RamBikes manager Taylor Welch used to operate a program by Opportunity, Alliance & Reentry of Richmond to provide formerly incarcerated people with bikes, locks and helmets — a means of transportation for the underserved.
Former RamBikes employee Alexa Santisteban is now the manager of Bellemeade Community Bike Shop, where elementary schoolers learn to ride, build and repair their bikes.
Former RamBikes mechanics Arin Larsen and Masha Timina — who preferred to be referred to by their first names — now work at Outpost Richmond, a bicycle shop in Forest Hill, where they still carry the sentiments of RamBikes.
The pair got into biking through necessity rather than leisure — a means of getting to and from work every day, but evolved into something more.
Masha and Arin used to bus themselves to work. They recalled a sense of class solidarity on their morning commutes, recognizing daily characters on the bus who were also just getting to their day jobs.
Masha was eventually gifted a cheap bike, which not only helped them ride home after a long day at work, but also overcome deep, personal struggles.
“After a long day, overstimulated, I would just be seeing people living their lives, like on the porch with their dogs, with their children running around,” Masha said. “The trees swinging in the wind, the birds chirping — it was my first experience of being in my body and feeling real, truthfully. It was like therapy for a while. It still is.”
Getting into biking again allowed Masha to reconnect with their childhood, they said. Masha grew up in Ukraine, where biking and public transportation are a way of life.
Masha’s newfound autonomy in their travel inspired them to check out Recess Forever, a community ride for trans women, intersex people and other gender non-conforming riders in Richmond. They first met Erickson there, who insisted on fixing Masha’s flat through a ride with pouring rain
“I saw Sera change a flat tire in five minutes maybe, and something clicked in my brain that changed my life for sure,” Masha said.
Both Masha and Arin have worked with Camp Spokes, a week-long day camp in the summer for girls and gender non-conforming youth.
Camp Spokes, collaboratively run by Bellemeade and Rag & Bones, offers kids a bike to rebuild, ride and take home at the end of the week. It was born out of a disparity in outdoor education opportunities, especially for Black and brown youth.
Campers ride in the city and on trails, as well as engage in other hands-on activities like screen printing, gardening and building with power tools. Camp Spokes has sessions for middle and high schoolers, and some high schoolers return to help out with the younger classes. Masha called it a tender, delicate job.
“It’s already an environment where things can be brought up that you wouldn’t expect to hear and know how to do something about,” Masha said. “But it’s like Arin said, like with a lot of bicycle parts, it’s hard to break them unless you’re just not gentle with it and taking your time.”
Erickson and Welch said bike culture — and society as a whole — has dramatically changed in recent years. What used to be gatekept by the tough and vulgar is now a home for young, alternative and queer people. Camp Spokes is a reaction to the culture of old.
“That’s who we were, and we wanted to do something,” Erickson said. “Something maybe we wish existed when we were kids.”
One Big Circle
There is a community bike ride for just about everyone in Richmond. Aside from Recess Forever, Spokes Serenity is a substance-free, beginner-friendly ride for cyclists in recovery. Some rides end in pool parties or hangouts along the James River, others culminate in a big victory dinner at Waffle House. And of course, there is Broad Street Bullies, the ride famous for shutting down entire intersections and angering impatient drivers.
A poster hanging in the RamBikes workshop details everyone they have worked with over the years. On the list is Richmond Safe Routes to Schools, the Mary and Frances Youth Center, Connecting Partners, Communities in Schools, the Mayor’s Youth Academy and the VCU School of Social Work.
Through those organizations, RamBikes has advocated for public infrastructure improvements, taught kids how to ride, provided youth with gear through grants, hosted camps and classes and refurbished abandoned bikes for rental use.
Erickson tagged and cut 45 bikes from VCU’s campus over the summer, which are refurbished and donated to efforts like Camp Spokes and Rag & Bones.
The VCU Bike Club, which shares plenty DNA with RamBikes, held an “Alley Rat Race” in May to raise money for Southside Releaf and their efforts to install green spaces to cool down Southside Richmond.
“It’s sort of like all these people right in the city that have met each other, and have this passion for sharing knowledge — like finding each other and doing projects together,” Erickson said.
More work to do
The DIY bike community is not perfect, according to Arin and Masha. While its members are progressive, they still suffer from the same faults other spaces do, such as gatekeeping, not always holding people accountable and the same tinge of ongoing racism found across America.
Arin has been bullied on rides, he said. People of color do not always receive the same community opportunities as their white peers and may be treated differently during events. Queer white people still have more to learn when it comes to tailoring events for queer people of color.
“There is the same thing that happens in other communities, where people are just protecting their friends,” Arin said. “I feel like they use leftist language to hide the fact that they don’t treat everyone fairly.”
Some rides built for queer people might turn people away for the sake of creating an inclusive, like-minded environment — but that sentiment is muddied through exclusion, according to Arin and Masha.
“By closing the doors to anybody that doesn’t actively and expressively identify as trans or whatever under the queer umbrella, you are effectively ‘othering’ people who may not know if they are or aren’t [trans] in their head, and they just can’t physically, fully express it,” Masha said.
The DIY bike community has work to do, as individuals and as a collective, according to Masha. Arin said the answer is not clear, but people should at least work to develop a “hiking culture” in which they carry themselves with the same unwarranted friendliness they do on the trail.
“I like waving to random people when I’m biking just to be like ‘I see you,’” Arin said. “‘We’re both on a bike. I don’t care that you’re like 30 years older than me and I literally don’t know you. ’Sup man!’”