TOGETHER, WE CAN BUILD A BILLION BICYCLES

SOLVING SHARED CHALLENGES

The Simple Cycle Project is predicated on the understanding that acquiring one or more utility cycles may well be the best investment an extreme-low-income family can make. For persons at the very lowest end of the income scale, increasing one’s personal transportation capability 9X to 16X promises to be absolutely transformative. For persons with severe mobility challenges, the benefit brought by an owner-built hand-cycle is unequaled. Today’s 700 million ‘extreme poor’ and some portion of the 3.5 billion ‘poor’ people worldwide have the need, motivation and capability to build these cycles and put them to work.

• If your organization works to empower those of low income in developing nations, the Simple Cycle Project can magnify the impact of the work you are doing.
• If your organization works to provide mobility for those with physical impairments, our handcycles and other adaptive cycles are designed around locally sourced labor and materials, thus minimizing both costs and shipping delays.
• If you seek to reduce poverty by empowering women, our woman-prioritizing designs can augment your other efforts. Simple cycles are ergonomically correct for women’s bodies, they include features specifically designed for mothers, they modestly accommodate women in dresses, and using one minimizes the energy drain and hours spent transporting children, goods, groceries and water.
• If you are working to keep young girls in school by minimizing time lost to the drudgery of hauling water, our girl-sized cargo bikes (such as the Ursa model) can cut the hours demanded of these girls, and the learning lost by their absence from school, by as much as 80%.
• If your organization is working to provide clean water to rural people, locally-built Simple tanker-cycles can help close the gaps in distribution of that water to outlying residences.
• If you seek to increase access to distant health clinics, building a Simple passenger-carrying model (and stationing it strategically) can provide transport for those unable to walk, and so improve health outcomes.
• If you are an NGO established in a town or region, you may be well placed to demonstrate and assist in the owner-building or group-building of bike frames and wheels. 

HOW YOU CAN HELP THIS PROJECT SUCCEED

Any size of group can help build Simple cycles for community members. The larger the membership of the group, the easier for some members to specialize and gain efficiencies. Experienced carpenters can be empowered to specialize in an area of the build which is the most demanding of precision, such as the building of wooden carriage wheels. Young persons might be productively employed in the physically challenging recycling of car and truck tire tread into non-pneumatic tires to be installed on wooden wheels. Persons unable to walk can specialize in appropriate aspects of building Simple hand-cycles, both for themselves and for others with mobility challenges. Seniors can specialize in building stable tricycles for themselves and others. Young persons might build for themselves pedal-trucks, pedicabs and cargo cycles, with which to start earning money. They might also build Simple cycles for sale to their neighbors.

If your organization is established in a region with a timber resource, you might work with local tree-farmers, foresters or tree-harvesting businesses (and soon, the growers/processors of bamboo as well) in setting up a supply of boards appropriate for Simple cycle building. Even if you can help supply no more than the main dimension ‘two-by-fours’ which constitute the spine of the frame, that one standardized wood product alone can anchor and expedite the building process. 

If you are in the bicycle importation and distribution business and wish to complement your existing work with production of some Simple cycles; you could add to your efforts the importation of those transmission components (chain, sprockets, and cranksets) needed for building up those higher-performance Simple models which utilize a chain-drive transmission.

If you import significant amounts of anything for your developing-nations project, you may be able to add pneumatic or flat-proof tires/tubes to your inbound shipments, as these are the primary items that cannot be owner-built, and which most severely limit putting the owner-built frame and wheels into action.

At this point in our development, we cannot give out Plans for free. Every Simple cycle built needs to result in payment to Simple Cycle Project of the standard plans fee. We have donated our labor for years, making slow but steady progress in research and development, but urgency now demands that we greatly accelerate delivery of finished plans to those we seek to serve. We need to turbocharge this effort. If your organization can pay the nominal fee for our plans on behalf of each of your beneficiaries, together we can make this happen.