Bike? Check. Helmet? Check. Floor pump? Allen wrench? Patch kit? Don’t worry — the University Bicycle Resource Center (UBRC) has you covered.
Located under Helen C. White Hall, the UBRC is a free, do-it-yourself bicycle repair shop offering service to campus’s cycling community. Staffed by bike-savvy students, the UBRC hosts bike maintenance workshops and houses a rich repository of professional-grade tools and resources — one of which is the UW’s cyclist in chief.
Chuck Strawser MS’01 is the bicycle and pedestrian coordinator with the UW’s Transportation Services,
a department within the Division of Facilities Planning and Management. In addition to operating the UBRC, he works with colleagues to ensure that cyclists and pedestrians have safe and efficient means of traveling through campus. This work repeatedly earns the UW the designation of platinum-level Bicycle Friendly University from the League of American Bicyclists, the oldest bicycle advocacy organization
in the country.
There’s no secret to providing award-winning service to campus cyclists, but it doesn’t hurt to be part of the population served. Strawser became an avid cyclist on his own college campus and worked in bike shops before joining the Wisconsin Bike Fed, where he lobbied for better bicycle infrastructure and spearheaded bike-commuting initiatives. Since then, bicycle advocacy has become Strawser’s life’s work.
“I realized I didn’t just want to fix bikes,” he says. “I wanted to fix the built environment to make it more accommodating and welcoming to people on foot or on bike.”
Here, Strawser breaks down the basics of bicycle maintenance and reflects on his most memorable rides.
The tool every bike owner should have in their garage is:
A good floor pump. It’s also good to have the basics to fix a flat: tire levers to get the tire off the rim and a patch kit or inner tube in a size to fit your tire. I usually carry the most common Allen wrenches — three, four, five, and six millimeters — so you can make sure things like water bottle cages [and] racks can be tightened if and when they come loose. But not everyone has a space to store tools and work on their bike, which is one of the reasons we provide a repair stand and tools, as well as consumable things like shop rags, lubricant, and grease — all in the heart of campus.
The basic upkeep a casual bike commuter should do to keep their bike in shape is:
Airing your tires and lubricating your chain. It’s much easier to keep your tires pumped up to an appropriate pressure than it is to fix a “pinch flat” caused by riding with your tire pressure too low. But it wouldn’t hurt to learn the ABC Quick Check (air; brakes; crank, chain, and cogs), too.
The gear every bicycle commuter should have is:
The keys to bicycling in traffic are to be visible, predictable, alert, and assertive. Bright colors make you more visible. I almost always wear a bright helmet when I commute by bike, but I’m also a proponent of just wearing whatever clothes you’re comfortable in outside to ride a bike. I can leave my colorful helmet on the bike when I get where I’m going and wear clothes that don’t make me look like a traffic cone.
The piece of gear that has saved me time and time again is:
A jacket that’s windproof and at least water resistant has kept me comfortable even when the weather changes really fast, as it sometimes does here in the Midwest. Good, weather-appropriate gloves are also important. It’s hard to brake, shift, and generally control your bike if your hands are wet or freezing.
The most common repairs we teach at the UBRC are:
How to remove wheels and fix flats; clean chains, lubricate components, and perform annual maintenance; maintain derailleurs and shifters; maintain brakes; and overhaul wheel hubs.
My favorite bike path in the Madison area is:
The Howard Temin Lakeshore Path on campus is one of my favorite places to ride, and I’m lucky enough that it’s part of my commute every day!
My favorite ride in Wisconsin is:
The trails at Levis Mound are some of my favorite single-track trails in Wisconsin, but I like the roads (both paved and gravel) in the Driftless area, too, especially among the bluffs along the Mississippi River.
The most memorable ride I did was:
My wife and I rode fully loaded touring bikes 1,200 miles from Vancouver, British Columbia, to San Francisco in the fall of 2001. That would have been memorable and surreal even if 9/11 hadn’t happened while we were riding bikes through redwoods on the opposite coast at the time.
The most iconic bicycle moment in cinema is:
I don’t know if this moment is iconic; in fact, I suspect most people who saw the movie won’t even remember it. But the cinematic bicycle that sticks in my mind is the Karate Kid’s BMX bike. He was supposed to be this poor kid of a single mom who’d just moved to Los Angeles, but the bike he rolled into their new apartment was super flashy: chrome-plated with blue-anodized aluminum rims. I remember thinking at the time that it was way nicer than the bikes any of my friends or I rode where I grew up. I think that’s when I first started to understand the cinematic concept of “the suspension
of disbelief.”
