Bike Co-op Founder Bids Adieu

After eight years of building up the Bradley Street Bicycle Co-op, John Martin has purchased his first gas-powered vehicle — and is taking off on a six-month sabbatical via van while the shop he founded changes gears.

Martin, who will officially step down as director of the East Rock community bike shop at the end of 2022, recently joined Hamden Council Member Justin Farmer on WNHH radio’s ​“Just-In Time Conversations” program to talk about how he began biking and about what lies next for him after breaking away from his organization. Watch the interview below.

“The point of the co-op is to build a more equitable New Haven by getting people on bikes,” Martin said during that interview. 

The co-op, made up of a few paid staff and a lot of volunteers, aims to achieve that through two primary strategies. 

First, the co-op, located in a garage at 138 Bradley St., provides for a small fee the space and tools for anyone looking to fix up their own bike.

The co-op also accepts donated bikes. Half of those bikes get repaired and sold to bike-hungry customers. The other half get fixed up and passed along to people in need of a pair of wheels, courtesy of the bike co-op’s teaming up with other local nonprofits like Integrated Refugee & Immigrant Services (IRIS) and the Connecticut Mental Health Center.

Read more about the co-op here.

“It started as a project,” Martin told the Independent in a follow-up interview. In 2015, Martin started a small, for-profit bike repair stop out of a Bradley Street space owned by his father, a retired electrician and farmer. At the time, he remembered thinking, ​“It would be cool to let some folks borrow my tools, because I’ve got a lot of tools!” 

In 2020, after years of earning community ​“cred,” Martin established a non-profit entity called the ​“Connecticut Community Bicycle Workshop.” 

In other words, as Martin explained to Farmer during the WNHH interview, ​“We are a nonprofit small business conglomerate that does a weird collection of projects,” including hosting community events and celebrations out of the Bradley Street garage.

As Martin moves on, the co-op is now merging those two entities to become entirely nonprofit and bringing new staff on to run the space.

“The leader of any good nonprofit needs to at some point step aside and let new people kind of take it and make sure it’s sustainable,” Martin said. ​“I’m much more interested in the co-op’s long-term success than my own stake in the co-op,” he added. 

Plus, he said, he hasn’t exactly been able to have a vacation while growing the co-op for nearly a decade. 

In 2023, Martin said he will be taking the 2018 RAM ProMaster high-roof van he recently acquired – the first car he’s ever bought — ​“for a kind of southern road trip” through Texas and New Mexico with no hard plans other than to visit ​“some national parks” as well as his mom.

"Kick & Coast"

It was family that prompted Martin to start the co-op, after he moved back after college to care for his father. His dad, whose New Haven property ultimately became home to the co-op, was also a farmer in Westbrook, Connecticut, where Martin grew up.

Martin first learned to bike on that farm. ​“I had a little mountain bike that I’d take on trails, go over little jumps in my gravel driveway and scratch my knee up,” he said.

But it wasn’t until he started attending college in Boston that biking became his main means of transport.

After a treacherous ride home from the bike shop and a few nervous bike rides around the city navigating street signage and regulations, Martin said he soon ​“fell in love with commuting.”

“And then I just became the kid that just always rode his bike everywhere,” he said. He soon recognized biking as a tool that ​“helped me fall in love with the city and learn the city and be so much more mobile and go to places I normally wouldn’t go or explore things I usually wouldn’t get to… you see so much and you’re a part of so much.”

Later on, Martin said he chose to pull the brakes on plans to go to grad school and earn an architecture license to move back home and care for his dad and help fix up his dad’s former workplace on Bradley Street, which was ​“flooded and hemorrhaging money.”

At the same time, he was getting to know the city of New Haven — a place he saw as a vibrant community lacking strong public transit services.

He was reminded of a worker-owned, small bike shop in Boston called Broadway Bicycle School. There, he said, customers could either drop their bike off for repairs, pay a small time-based fee to use the shop’s tools and fix their own bikes, or pay more to pair up with a mechanic and learn.

“I went to New Haven and we didn’t have that. And I was like, oh, I want somewhere to walk in, be able to use a tool and walk out,” Martin said. When it came to bikes, he had tools. And he realized he could share for a couple of bucks back.

Starting the business ​“made me fall in love with New Haven and continue to build this thing that people really seem to appreciate,” Martin said, fueling an extant desire to get more New Haveners and people around Connecticut on bikes.

“It was always at the core of what we wanted to do,” Martin said. ​“We wanted to make change more than we wanted to make money.” 

Martin said the co-op now helps over 1,000 people fix their bikes every year — and gives another 300-something bikes to nonprofits at the same time.

Since making good on his goal to manufacture more bike-owners, Martin is following through on another mission of the co-op: ​“Trying to get others to make decisions has been foundational work I’ve been doing for years,” he said.

With Martin readying to leave, a volunteer board that advises the co-op’s growth and work ​“really came together and said we wanna make sure this thing sticks,” Martin said. Now, he shared, ​“I’m stepping away from being the leader, hiring more staff, and giving them a lot of agency and power.” 

The collective voice of those volunteers made up ​“the moment that really changed the governance structure of the co-op,” Martin said. Click here to read about the bike co-op’s new staff members / leaders.

As he departs, Martin shared a couple of tips for those who may not already know how to ride a bike.

First, he said, ​“take the pedals off and find something smaller than what you actually wanna ride… you wanna Fred Flintstone that thing.”

Focus first on balance until you can ​“kinda kick and coast for a few feet,” Martin advised, and you’ll soon be ready to take off on a real ride. ​“Just keep practicing,” he urged.

For those without a bike, he noted, there’s a place on Bradley Street where you can borrow one.

He advised: ​“You can always come by the shop.”