It’s been a busy week at the Minneapolis Cargo Bike Lending Library! We have some fun updates to share, including:
- First rentals
- New bike!
- Orientation & booking updates
First Rentals: We had our first bike rental from a MCBL member (anyone who has taken our orientation & is eligible to rent bikes) last week. This member took the Aventon Abound a staggering 125 miles around the city last week. He took the bike “everywhere” including work, school drop off/pick up, grocery shopping, and on weekend adventures (including Baker’s Wife). When you rent a bike from us, please share your adventures with us (via social media, text, email, etc.)!
Today all 3 available bikes went out the (Cyclehoop hangar) door to new renters! We love filling the hangar with bikes, but it’s even more fun seeing the hangar empty because the bikes are with you all.
New Bike: This week we also welcomed a NEW BIKE to the library. Everyone, meet our new Bunch bike! We are working on fixing a couple accessories that were damaged in transit and hope to have the bike added to our calendar starting the first week in May. As soon as it’s ready to book we’ll share with our mailing list (so be sure to subscribe, if you haven’t already) and on Bluesky. This bike is able to hold up to 400lbs in the front cargo area (dogs, children, an adult, or cargo of any sort!). We’re super grateful to our partners at Bunch for loaning this bike to our program.
Orientation & booking updates: On Saturday we hosted an orientation to officially welcome another 10 MCBL members! We have one more orientation planned for May 20th at 6pm. We just opened up 5 more spaces in that training, so grab one ASAP if you want to get in on our pilot year… because future orientations are TBD.
As you can imagine, with just 4 bikes in our fleet & 30+ folks having completed orientation already, 1 week rentals are booking up quickly and will continue far into the summer. We don’t want anyone to take an orientation and then not be able to rent a bike all year… so we’ll only add additional orientations once we’re relatively sure we can fit everyone in this pilot year. Thanks for your patience with us.
We have only released bookings through the end of May for now to make sure we can work out any kinks nice and early. At the end of April we plan to open bookings for June & July and will continue to release things in 1-2 month increments from there.
That’s all for now! As a reminder, if you want to see more programs like this, please share about it with friends, neighbors, elected officials, the Metropolitan Council (who funded this first pilot & we hope might help support us next year), etc. BikeMN even created some fun merch items for us! If you’re in a position to donate, we can accept donations here. If you have questions, ideas, or opportunities you’d like to share, please reach out via our contact page.
Leave a Reply