Right next to the upcoming Humboldt Bay Trail sits a blue graffitied shipping container on L Street, home to Arcata’s Bicycle Library.
Volunteers open shop every Saturday from noon to 4 p.m., unless there’s rain or a storm. The service is run on a pay-what-you-can system, where customers can choose to pay based on their available income. For those who can’t afford them, the services and bikes are free.
Visitors can rent or buy a bike that has been refurbished or get their bikes repaired. All proceeds go back into the library to get more parts so it can continue refurbishing old bikes in a perpetual effort to provide wheels to those who need them.
Locals often donate old bikes and some even scavenge them from a nearby dump to bring to the bicycle library. Volunteers then take these bikes and repair them to get them operating for anyone who needs them.
Austin Burton-Tauzer, a volunteer at the library, said one regular visitor who collects bikes often donates mid-grade parts to the library.
“A lot of people know about it, and they’ll be going to the dump and have like three bikes that are pretty good, they’ve just been sitting forever,” Burton-Tauzer said.
Leslie Smithers, who moved to the county a few years ago, came to the library Nov. 16 with $70 worth of tires they found at the local dump. They said that they have even found whole bike frames to donate in the past.
“We live in a world where an immense amount of things are produced at a scale that’s unimaginable,” Smithers said. “So, we do the little things we can, like grab shit out of the dumpster, give it to the bike co-op, hope it finds a better home.”
The Arcata Bike Library gives those who might not be able to afford a bike or to get theirs fixed, the opportunity to — a vital service to those dependent on a bike as their only means of transportation.
“The bikes that are made at the bike co-op go to anyone you can imagine,” Smithers said. “My bike is from the bike co-op, huge amounts of members of the unhoused community here in Humboldt County utilize the bike co-op.”
Burton-Tauzer has been a long-time resident of Arcata and started volunteering at the library two years ago after he began using a bike as his main source of transportation. He said the library serves all kinds of people from all walks of life.
“There’s a recycling couple that comes by, and they always need this or that and are really capable of getting it on their bike themselves a lot of times,” Burton-Tauzer said. “So, they reuse a lot of lower quality parts because they don’t mind and they totally wear them out over the weeks, or two weeks or month, so we see them pretty often.”
Frank Speck, a Eureka resident, recently traveled up to get the chain on his bike fixed after hearing about the library on Craigslist (Danny Franks, a volunteer at the bicycle library, said another volunteer posts there in their spare time). The Arcata Bicycle Library also has a website, but volunteers currently don’t have access to it, so the information is out of date.
While Eureka has a bicycle library of its own, Speck said it’s always packed, which is why he traveled to Arcata for help with his bike.
“Damn, that’s perfect!” he exclaimed when volunteers had fixed the broken chain on his bike within an hour. He then stayed and chatted with volunteers until the library closed.
“It’s a community thing,” Speck said. “People stop by and there’s been people just sitting in lawn chairs, chatting, and this is a continuous flow of people. It’s almost like a meeting.”
Jason Guick said he has been regularly visiting the bike library for about 15 years, saying a bike is his main source of transportation.
“A lot of the times I couldn’t afford the parts, they helped me out a lot,” Guick said.
The bicycle library moved five times before settling into the shipping container it currently calls home.
The library was started in the late 1990s by Bill Burton, a long-time Arcata resident, who had the idea of “loaning” bikes to the community, according to the Arcata Bike Library website, which notes its humble origins in a rented garage at the Marsh Commons on G Street.
At its peak, the library was housed in a building off the plaza that has since been converted into multiple shops, including Rita’s Margarita & Mexican Grill. The Arcata Bike Library also received funding from the city and, at one point, had around 2,500 bikes for use.
The bicycle library was also once located at a car dealership, where they used the car pits — the trenches mechanics use to service cars from underneath — to store bikes that were donated.
“We would just throw our junky bikes that were too junky to fix in that pit, so like it was like hundreds of bikes in the pit,” Franks recalled.
Burton initially started the library to encourage more bike transportation to help with the environment, and Burton-Tauzer says that remains part of the mission.
“We generally believe that riding your bike places in this community works really well,” Burton-Tauzer said. “It’s basically quicker, cheaper, it’s environmentally friendly and helps people get out into their community more than inside your car.”
The United States Environmental Protection Agency estimates that a typical passenger vehicle emits around 4.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide a year. Colin Fiske, executive director of the Coalition for Responsible Transportation Priorities, said those emissions “basically disappear” when someone replaces their car with a bike.
“The bottom line is, biking saves a whole lot of emissions when compared to driving — or actually any other form of transportation,” Friske said. “Biking is the most energy efficient mode of transportation in terms of energy expended per mile traveled — even more so than walking.”
Frank said Arcata used to have more bike-friendly infrastructure, and Friske added that he has heard from locals about this same issue. However, Friske said bike infrastructure has been improving, with more bike lanes and off-street trails, but “not as fast as it needs to.”
“We need a lot more, but we definitely have more than we used to,” Friske said. “I think that what people are feeling when they’re out there and feeling like it’s getting less safe is increased traffic and also increased size of the vehicles, which is … happening across the U.S.”
Have you seen those electric scooters and electric bikes around cities’ sidewalks available for rent, like they have in Fortuna? Arcata used to have a similar system called “green bikes” run by the Arcata Bicycle Library. Bikes were repaired, painted green and scattered around the city for anyone to use for free.
“Total anarchy,” Frank said of the system, adding that “green bikes” could be found all the way down in San Francisco.
With bikes getting damaged — it wasn’t uncommon for people to run them over or throw them in nearby bodies of water — the program shifted to requiring a deposit and then was discontinued as the library’s volunteer staff shrank and the paperwork became too much to keep up with.
That ultimately led to the current pay-what-you-can system, with bikes rented out, sold or given depending on need and ability to pay. Volunteers at the library hope to sell fully refurbished bikes for $40 to $60, but that is only for folks who can afford the full price.
The library is open to anyone wanting to volunteer to lend a helping hand, and also has volunteers available to teach anyone who wants to learn how to repair their own bikes.
That is exactly what happened with Kris Skotheim, a new volunteer who decided to come down for the first time Oct. 26. Skotheim said he was curious, having previously worked at a student-run bike shop on campus at the University of Washington.
“I live close by, so I have always ridden by on the bike path, and I’ve come by a couple times,” Skotheim said. “I never really spent time to work on a bike, today’s my first time, so I asked if there was a bike I could work on.”
On his first day volunteering, he helped repair a woman’s bicycle, replacing the handlebars.
“She said that she was having some pain in her back because her handlebars were too low, and she was a 70-year-old woman,” Skotheim said. “It sounded like she rides a lot between Eureka and McKinleyville on a fairly regular basis, so it’s important for her, who uses a bike as a main source of transportation, to have a bike that fits.”
As luck would have it, Skotheim had another set of handlebars laying around his home, so he biked back to get them. They fit the woman’s bike perfectly.
Anne To (she/her) is a California Local News Fellow placed with North Coast Journal, Inc. Reach her at (707) 442-1400, extension 312, or anne@northcoastjournal.com. The California Local News Fellowship is a state-funded initiative to support and strengthen local news reporting. Learn more about it at fellowships.journalism.berkeley.edu/cafellows.
This article appears in Through Mark Larson’s Lens 2025.