Whose Streets? Their Streets!

Scott Smedberg has been active in city bike politics for years; he and a group of advocates founded Bike On, which promotes bicycling in Minneapolis. On a sunny Monday afternoon, we ride down to west Bloomington for the annual bike-advocacy pizza party at Quality Bicycle Products, one of the largest companies importing bicycle parts in the country. Smedberg, a tall, thin, middle-aged guy with a mustache and a long ponytail, has been “car-free” for thirty years. He loves riding his bike—“the bicycle shrinks the individual and expands nature”—but he says being a full-time rider can be awkward in the mainstream car culture. At dinner parties, people are always offering him rides home. And then there are the tiresome questions. “When people ask me if my wife and I would ever consider buying a car,” Smedberg says, “I tell them, ‘It’s just as likely we would buy a helicopter.’ ”

Quality Bicycle Products, now located on the south end of the Hyland Park Reserve, began as a one-man, one-dog parts shop in 1981 and grew slowly; now it boasts $100-plus million in annual sales and 400 employees working in a massive new LEED gold–certified complex with recycled office furniture, a rain garden to prevent toxic run-off from the parking lot, and buckets filled with compost worms in the sparkling new lunch room. Several beautiful Surlys and Salsa bikes—two popular local models designed or distributed by QBP—are chained to the racks out front.

My host at QBP is Gary Sjoquist. The in-shape fifty-four-year-old with silver perma-stubble quit his job as a computer programmer ten years ago to become one of Minnesota’s first bicycle lobbyists. He founded the Minnesota Coalition of Cyclists and began pushing for both state and federal funding. As QBP’s “director of bicycle advocacy” since 1998, he sets up rides for kids, is a regular presence at city, state, and national bike committee meetings, and on occasion delivers privately ordered bicycles to Congressman Jim Oberstar, chair of the powerful House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and Minnesota’s current bicycle sugar daddy. Sjoquist just got back from a bike policy tour of Amsterdam and Münster, two of the top bicycle venues in Europe, cities where four out of ten commuters ride bikes to work. Today he drops a surprising stat on the group. “The average age of the typical independent-bicycle-shop consumer is forty-six,” he says.

Sjoquist gets this number from the latest figures released by the National Bicycle Dealer’s Association, which tracks the $6 billion bicycle industry nationwide. “The biggest drop-off has been the under nineteen demo,” he says. “The number of kids riding bikes to school has dropped off 50 percent in one generation. So if you’re over forty, you probably rode your bike to school—if you’re under forty, you didn’t.”

That means that while big box stores like Target and Wal-Mart still sell almost eight of every ten bicycles sold in America, those sales account for only 37 percent of the total dollars spent on bikes. Bikes sold by independent dealers to older, more affluent customers paying $400 to $3,000 account for only 17 percent of the unit sales, but 49 percent of the national revenue. Locally, big box retailers sold 200,000 bicycles at an average price of $72, while indie retailers moved 50,000 bicycles at an average price of $422. Despite the fact that there are 110 independent dealers in Minnesota, most of those bikes are sold by either Erik’s Bike Shop or Penn Cycle, which are responsible for 70 percent of Minneapolis’s bicycle sales.           

According to Sjoquist, the avatar of the Minneapolis bike culture isn’t the punk rock fixed-gear dude who either rides his bike to work or works on it—it’s the affluent, middle-aged guy who pedals around the lakes to keep fit and who can a afford a garage in south Minneapolis to house his $1,000 Trek. “A lot of it has to do with location,” Sjoquist says. “And Minnesotans are determined to recreate.”