AUSTIN, Texas — Thousands of dollars worth of bicycles were stolen from an Austin nonprofit earlier this month.
The Yellow Bike Project takes the bikes you no longer want and fixes them up.
“Some of them we sell to the public to provide reasonably priced transportation options, but the majority of them we fix up and we give them away,” Pete Wall, the staff manager at the Yellow Bike Project, said.
He said the nonprofit, which started in 1997, works to help fix a broken system.
“We have a problem in the city with air pollution, and traffic, and congestion, and transportation inequity,” Wall said. “So we believe that bicycles can solve a lot of problems at once.”
The nonprofit gave away 1,185 bikes last year alone to kids and organizations who needed them – like Casa Marianella, which helps displaced migrants find shelter and become self-sufficient.
“They helped me a lot, and they gave me a bike,” Ahmed Salem Semba, an immigrant from Marutainia, said.
He said it’s difficult to get around town or to work without a car, and buses aren’t too much better.
“Sometimes 20 minutes, sometimes 15 minutes. Depends on the place where you go," Semba said. "Also, I find the job, if it's late, it is difficult to return back home because it's after the bus."
He said his bike has given him more options for traveling around the city.
But a few weeks ago, the Yellow Bike Project was broken into.
“People broke through our bay door, and they took about 20 of our finished sale bikes,” Wall said. “That represents, probably, $8,000 to $10,000 worth of labor and value.”
He said the nonprofit was left with broken glass to sweep up and rows of empty bike racks.
“I felt sad about it because we give bikes away to people who need them. So, whoever stole the bikes probably could have gotten free bikes from us if they had just gone through our relatively simple process,” Wall said.
He said once a month, the Yellow Bike Project opens a form on its website that social services or schools can use to help people apply for a bike. Wall said the nonprofit has 20 to 50 people waiting for bikes each month.
“They need transportation like, yesterday, and they're not going to get it for probably another month,” Wall said.
He said all the nonprofit can do to fix the problem is fix more bikes for people like Semba.
“Trying to make as many more bikes as we can, as fast as we can,” Wall said.
Leaders with the Yellow Bike Project say if you want to learn more about bikes and fixing them, you can come volunteer with them anytime. They say they are also accepting donations on their website, which they say they will use to keep fixing bikes and giving them to people who need them.
The Austin Police Department said there are currently no suspects in this case. The department said the business was able to recover three of the bikes from a nearby park, but it’s hard to say where the others may have gone, as there are many ways a bike could be resold or pawned.