The love and dedication that Tim Potter pours into bicycling has brought many good things his way.
For starters, Potter can credit bicycling for leading him to his wife, Hiromi, the daughter of Japanese bike racing champ Seiichi Nishiji. More recently, Potter’s dedication brought him the opportunity to manage an innovative new program spinning around
Michigan State University in East Lansing.
MSU Bikes is a university-sponsored program that simultaneously encourages bike use and supports the biking community, all while helping to clean up the campus.
The program was originally conceived as a way to encourage university faculty and employees to do a little more biking and a little less driving. Under Potter's direction, MSU Bikes picks the best bikes out of the crop of bikes regularly abandoned and cleared from the racks around campus, cleans them up and gets them back on the road.
Student employees tear down and rebuild the bikes, test them for safety and bring them back to life as the now ubiquitous Green Bikes.
Biwako, a Bike and a BridePotter’s obsession with biking began out of necessity, providing an essential mode of transportation for a kid that grew up outside the city limits of the Lansing suburb of Okemos. By his mid-teens, Tim’s older brother steered him into bike racing and other two-wheeled adventures, including an
unsupported 1,500-mile trip around Lake Michigan and into Michigan's Upper Peninsula.
In his late teens, Potter and a friend bought 100 used bikes, a crop of tools and spare parts and opened a bike shop in his parent’s basement. They learned to “wrench,” which is biker slang for the repair and adjustment of bicycles. Before long friends and friends of friends took their bike repairs to Potter.
But then, while attending
Lansing Community College (LCC), Potter took a chance on the school’s
Japan Adventure program, a work-study experience that places Midwestern kids in the employ of the
Biwako Hotel, an old and prestigious hotel located on Japan’s largest freshwater lake, Lake Biwako.
The Japanese have a particular appetite for bicycle racing. The country holds claim to more velodromes — the steeply banked racing arenas designed for the post -WWII sport of
Keirin — than any other country in the world.
Potter’s friend, a hard-core, competitive bike racer, told him about the velodromes and encouraged him to check out the legendary structures if he had the chance.
Potter and his fellow LCC students rolled into the town in Japan and, much to Potter’s surprise, set up shop in the hotel directly across from the velodrome.
“The first day that I had any time off at all I ran across the street and found my way in,” Potter says.
He also found a way to cross the language barrier and was soon training with local Keirin racers, riding on borrowed equipment. Potter made friends with Kousuke Nishiji, a Top 10 Keirin racer, by trading an introduction to his female classmates for a wrenching hookup at Nishiji’s favorite bike shop.
Shortly thereafter, Nishiji returned the favor a second time by introducing Tim to his “ugly sisters,” one of whom was named Hiromi. After a couple of cross-Pacific visits Potter and Hiromi married and Nishiji became Potter’s brother-in-law.
Tim found himself moving from Japan to Chicago to Michigan and back again. Eventually, to be near his family, he settled into a position with
MSU’s Alumni Association and became active in the on-campus bike culture.
Rolling For SustainabilityThe Michigan Agricultural College (MAC) Cycling Club dates back to 1894, long before the MAC became MSU.
The cycling club intersected with two key faculty members many decades later when, in 2003, Gus Gosselin and Terry Link began the "MSU Bike Project” initiative.
The original plan was to lease bikes to individual university departments in order to offer a convenient way for employees to move quickly around campus without having to deal with parking on MSU’s busy campus.
Gosselin and Link found volunteers that were willing to trade some free time restoring salvaged bikes to get access to the shop to work on their own equipment. The program completed 25 bikes in its first year.
During that year, one of the volunteers was struck by inspiration while witnessing the words “MSU Bike Project” being hand-stenciled onto a freshly green-painted frame. A batch of stickers was ordered, and “Green Bikes” began to pop up everywhere on campus.
Potter was a MSU Bike Project volunteer, and is a committed bike-commuter. He relished the opportunity to “go wrench on bikes” during his lunch hour. By spring of 2005, Potter says, “the program was so successful it couldn’t meet demand.”
Repeated, glowing praise in the annual reports of MSU’s All University Traffic and Transportation Bike and Pedestrian Safety Subcommittee garnered the interest of university leaders. Within months, space and dollars were allocated, and Potter found himself at the helm of MSU Bikes, designing a bike shop, procuring tools and parts, and finding the most capable bike mechanics on campus.
The shop, right on MSU's River Trail under the Bessey Hall auditorium, opened in the fall of 2006. Now, nearly halfway through his five-year “trial period,” Potter’s program is achieving the goal of breaking even, and the future is rosy.
Potter says MSU Bikes has “provided thousands of bike repairs and rented out more than 700 bikes. We’ve done well enough financially in our almost two years of operations to make my bosses and the administrators here happy.”
Potter has started a
listserv for campus bike programs around the country that has grown to 75 members, and is planning a mini-conference this November to help others that are starting similar programs.
With the premium that the university is putting on “green” initiatives these days, Green Bikes has taken on a double meaning.
The program essentially recycles abandoned bikes, beautifying the campus and keeping the bikes out of the trash dumps, and provides cheap, carbon-emission-free transportation for students and staff. The presence of a bike shop on campus is a boon to MSU bikers who maintain their rides without traveling halfway across town. And an unexpected benefit is that “MSU’s ugly bikes” are less attractive to those with ill intentions, cutting down on theft.
Jeff Shoup lives, works, and plays music in his hometown of Lansing, Michigan.
Dave Trumpie is the managing photographer for Capital Gains. He is a freelance photographer and owner of Trumpie Photography.
Photos:Tim Potter
The bike shop service center at MSU
Directions to the shop
The early days of MSU biking (courtesy MSU archives)
Tim works with a student and parents on fitting a bike
All Photographs © Dave Trumpie