Transactions on Transport Sciences 2025, 16(2):15-22 | DOI: 10.5507/tots.2024.023

Community Bike Workshops in Australia: Increasing Demand for Cycling Through Mutual Aid

Simon Batterburya, Carlos Uxob, Margot Abord de Chatillonc, Stephen Nursed
a. University of Melbourne, School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, 221 Bouverie St, 3010 VIC, Australia
b. Monash University, Wellington Road, Clayton, 3800 Victoria, Australia
c. Labex Futurs Urbains, Université Gustave Eiffel, France.
d. Independent scholar

In this article, our goal is to analyse a small but growing movement of community bike workshops or 'bike kitchens' in Australia. Bicycles are reliable forms of 'active' travel for short and moderate length journeys, in an age where carbon emissions must be reduced and reuse, recycling and refurbishment of everyday objects like bicycles are increasingly identified as key elements of sustainability transitions in western countries. A community bike workshop is a not-for-profit community-based organization formed around the restoration and maintenance of bicycles. From interviews, surveys and participant-observation over several years in Australia and in Europe, we show how community bike workshops challenge consumerism and reliance on cars (termed, automobility), offering an innovative pathway to increasing bike ridership and acceptance of this mode of transport in urban environments. We find that they additionally support vélonomie, developing confidence among riders to repair a bicycle and to ride it safely. Bike ridership is slowly expanding in Australia, a nation of high carbon emissions per capita and high vehicle ownership. We demonstrate that repair workshops help to increase 'demand' for cycling, by encouraging confidence with mechanical tasks, greater expertise, and convivial sharing of tools and knowledge. As part of increasing ridership and hence demand for cycling provision, they operate in very different ways to more expensive 'supply-side' interventions that tend to dominate planning interventions. Supply-side policies prioritise costly bike lanes, junction treatments, safer streetscapes and bike share schemes. This agenda is favoured by urban authorities, engineers, and planners. By contrast we characterise community workshops, including those we have volunteered at in Australia, as 'mutual aid' organisations, following Kropotkin. We show that although they still have quite limited geographical coverage in Australia centred on Melbourne, they are making a modest contribution to an affordable, more sustainable, and active transportation agenda. In addition, their participants can benefit from their activities across gender, race, age, wealth, and wellness.

Keywords: Cycling; Australia; mutualism; community bike workshops; vélonomie

Received: June 8, 2024; Revised: October 13, 2024; Accepted: November 5, 2024; Prepublished online: January 7, 2025; Published: September 15, 2025  Show citation

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Batterbury, S., Uxo, C., de Chatillon, M.A., & Nurse, S. (2025). Community Bike Workshops in Australia: Increasing Demand for Cycling Through Mutual Aid. Transactions on Transport Sciences, 16(2), 15-22. doi: 10.5507/tots.2024.023
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