TOGETHER, WE CAN BUILD A BILLION BICYCLES

HOW TO BUILD A BILLION BICYCLES

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 can be absolutely transformative. For persons with severe mobility challenges, the benefit brought by an owner-built hand-cycle or other adaptive conversion is unequaled. A good percentage of the world'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 use them to rise out of poverty.

SOLVING SHARED CHALLENGES 

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 adaptive options are designed to be built by family members (or community enterprises), using locally sourced  materials, at minimal cost, without shipping delays.
• If you seek to reduce poverty by empowering women, our woman-prioritizing designs can augment your efforts. Simple cycles are designed to be ergonomically correct for women’s bodies. They include features specifically designed for mothers, modestly accommodate women in dresses, and the use of one can minimize 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 a substantial percentage.
• 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 their community members. The larger the membership of the group, the easier for some members to specialize and gain efficiencies. Experienced carpenters might specialize in fabrication 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 recycle 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, either for themselves or for others with similar 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, using these vehicles to start earning additional income. 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 dimensional ‘two-by-four’ boards 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 the production of Simple cycles, you could add to your efforts the importation of those transmission components (chain, sprockets, and cranksets) needed for building up higher-performance 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/inserts to your inbound shipments, as these are the primary items that cannot be owner-built, and which most severely limit getting the owner-built frame and wheels in service and on the road.

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 nominal plans fee. We have donated our labor to this project for years, making slow but steady progress in research and development. Reaching our goals demands that we accelerate delivery of finished plans to those we seek to serve, and in so doing, create an income. We need to turbocharge this effort. If your organization can pay the cost of our plans on behalf of each of your beneficiaries, together we will make this happen.