People know that they can come to us for help. Many of our members are extremely poor, including a dozen or so that are homeless or living on the very edge of homelessness, and have problems we can't solve. One problem we would like to take a crack at, though, is the too-common occurrence of biking in the dark, practically invisible, because bike lights are just too expensive. Not only is night riding without bike lights illegal, it is also incredibly dangerous: while most accidents happen during daytime (when the most cycling happens), accidents at night are more likely to be fatal. But so many people run that risk nightly, and who can blame them when lights can cost as much or more than the bikes themselves?

Unfortunately, we don't get many donations of lights, and even at the wholesale price that we get through our parts distributor, buying them new to distribute widely is beyond our means. Our current solution is to buy $3 caution lights from a local hardware store and duct tape them to the bike - this is a bandaid fix, since the battery life of these devices is poor, and the duct tape doesn’t hold up for long against the vibrations and jolts that are routine parts of urban bike riding.

We can do better!!