There's no better way to see the world than on a bike. Join me on my rides around Europe to discover what lies beyond my handlebars

Wednesday 13 January 2016

Hero, the novel bike with green roots

Greensboro's Main Street - boarded up shops - but the barber is still in business

With snow, slush, salt and grit on the roads, this is not the time of year for bike riding. Instead, here is a heart-warming story with an unusual bike at its centre.


Deep in Alabama's rural Black belt, in Hale County, is a little town called Greensboro, once an important cotton growing area with a high proportion of slaves to the white population. Later it was a bastion of the segregationists (and quite possibly those sentiments are still alive among some residents). Today, a large number of the descendants of the slaves live in poverty, often in shacks with no running water or sanitation.

Over the years, with the growth of out-of-town shopping malls, new highways shifting passing traffic away from the town, the centre of Greensboro has fallen into decay. Shops are closed and boarded, the antebellum homes around the centre are faded and peeling, and hardly a soul is to be seen on Main Street.

Pictured left is Lance Rake with his prototype hexagonal frame of bamboo strips


Into this sad situation comes a non-profit, self-help group aiming to revitalise the community and to assist the poorest members of the community into simple but modern and sanitary homes. With volunteers, schemes which help with finance in exchange for work, and a basic house design, HERO is transforming the lives of folks whose homes are without the facilities which we take for granted - and which one might expect everyone in the USA enjoys.

In addition, HERO, which stands for "Hale Empowerment and Revitalisation Organisation”, under its executive director Pam Dorr, has launched a number of ventures including the Pie Lab, a cafe in the town centre offering "food and conversation".

So where's the bike angle? Growing a short way from the centre of town is plenty of bamboo planted in the late 1800s. In 2009, as part of the Hero project, a team designed and began construction of cycles using bamboo as the frame. Now, under the guidance of Lance Rake, a professor of industrial design, in one of the empty shops in the main street Herobike builds and sells a range of street and touring bikes. The bamboo "tubes" are bound together with carbon fibre and, says Lance, offer a comfortable ride similar to that of steel frames.

Shop window model 

He has since begun working on a frame made of strips of bamboo bound together with glass fibre in a hexagonal cross section. Lance is also experimenting with weaving the bamboo strips to make a skateboard and an electrobike. All these products are using simple technology and locally available materials.

Made by the Kansas University students - the bamboo running bike

In January 2016 a group of design students from Kansas were doing a practical exercise at the Hero hq, building "running bikes" for children and using the bamboo strip technique for a wave board.

Most of the Hero bikes are bought on line and are also available in kit form. Workshops are run where you can, with guidance, build your own bamboo bike. Not only are the results practical functioning bikes, they are also a novelty which is contributing to the community effort in this struggling little town.

Find your Hero Bike here: http://www.herobike.org
More about the Hero project: http://www.herohousing.org

Kansas University students at work in the Herobike workshop
Bonding the joints

Bamboo drying in the January sun outside the Herobike workshop in the Greensboro main street



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