The everyday cyclist
Commuter Cycles, a down-to-earth workshop in Brunswick, reminds us that you don’t have to wear lycra to be a cyclist. You just need a bike, and the desire to ride.
Words by Patrick Boyle
Photos by Tanika Gondhali
“Every time you put foot to pedal, you get that same feeling as the first day you learned how to balance,” says Huw Vellacott, founder of Bruns wick’s Commuter Cycles. “It never wears off.” The inner-north bike workshop celebrates its tenth birthday in 2018. In that decade the number of Australians commuting to work by bike has surpassed 100,000. In the same span of time, the workshop’s inner-north Melbourne neighbourhood has shed its grungy-student vibe and grown a faux-grunge, pro-brunch aesthetic. Huw recalls how, when he was a teenager without a car or a license to drive one, a bike promised him complete freedom and independence. But he admits that, after he turned 18, he didn’t get on a bike for a decade. “Then I had a year overseas with my then-partner, now-wife,” Huw says. “We had a campervan with two bikes on the back. We’d go to each city and stay in a caravan park and then use our bicycles to get around. I said to myself: ‘You idiot. What have you been doing? Why don’t you ride around like this at home?’
“When you’re overseas you reflect on your own life and I came back from that trip adamant that I would get a job that enabled me to cycle there each day. I did, and I got right back into cycling.” In this part of his life, Huw embodied the customer he would later build his business to cater for: the everyday cyclist. “It became really apparent to me that the bicycle industry in Australia was focused almost exclusively on recreational cycling, which is road or mountain bikes. But the everyday cyclists – who do a lot more riding, and in many ways their bikes are far more important to them were often treated by the bike shops like an afterthought.
‘There was a mentality of “Oh, you’re on your $800 bike? Come back and talk to me when you’re on a $10,000 bike.”’
Huw opened Commuter Cycles in 2008 as a workshop for people who ride their bike every day but don’t consider themselves avid cyclists. For these customers, a bike is a means to an end: get to work on time and alive. At first Commuter Cycles was a one-man operation: his only company in the workshop was the late Lola, a kelpie. He was living in Brunswick, it was his community, and he was an example of his own customer base, which helped put Commuter Cycles on the map. Then there’s the convenient location, just a block from the Upfield Bike Path, which carves through Brunswick up to Coburg and beyond.
“What also made a big difference is that a lot of bike workshops don’t open till nine or ten in the morning, but you’ve already ridden to work by then,” Huw says. “I initially opened the workshop from 7:30am to 6:30pm. The idea was you’d drop off your bike, grab a courtesy bike, we do the work that day, and you pick up your own bike on the way back home.” Today, Commuter Cycles has a team of mechanics and Huw has expanded his retail efforts to selling favourite rigs. “When we first opened we were just a work shop and that still remains,” Huw says. “We’re more mechanics than anything else. So we wouldn’t sell a bike that’s hard to work on, or there’s a mentality of ‘Oh, you’re on your $800 bike? Come back and talk to me when you’re on a $10,000 bike’. unreliable.”
Bike shops are often places where we consumers roll up feeling defeated and in search of specialist knowledge, where bike nerds dole out shame with their services, but the Commuter Cycles space is anything but intimidating I sheepishly recount a recent debacle with my bike’s derailleur (best described as the pok ey-outy bit on the back-wheel-gear-thingy), and how I was treated like an idiot at an inner city workshop. Paying hundreds of dollars for cackled condescension can be rough. Huw calls out this ‘machismo bullshit’, and I immediately concur. “I’ve made a very diligent effort to be a collegiate person, and I appreciate most industry people in this country,” Huw clarifies. “But one thing in Australia is that the bike industry is populated solely by bike people. The shops are owned and run by cyclists and most of the industry are recreational mountain and road cyclists, who are often inherently competitive people. “Because they’re so into cycling, they can assume that other people will be equally into it and know as much as they do. This idea forms that if you know less than them, you’re somehow less of a cyclist.”
Talking to Huw, it becomes clear that his sense of community is the core of the Commuter Cycles business model. He’s all about encouraging customers, as well as any just mildly curious bike owners, to get involved in casual cycling as a fun weekend activity. “We’re keen to show people that you don’t need to ride around Peru to be a cycle-tourist. There’s so much on our doorstep – you can do a day ride out to Warburton. You don’t need to train for it, you don’t need to be superhuman or have a super fancy bike. If you’re able-bodied, and you’ve got a bike, just go,” he says. “I describe that kind of riding as heightened bushwalking… You’re in nature, and you’re going slow enough that you can still take it in and hear the birds and because you’re not walking you can cover more ground and see more. It’s got all the beauty of bushwalking, but it’s just amplified a bit.”
With the help of Pepper, one particularly vibrant crew member, Commuter Cycles also run women’s and non-binary rides around Melbourne’s outskirts. “Having Pepper on board enabled us to be able to do those things and support those ideas,” Huw says. “Our industry is sadly still very male-dominated. Getting non-blokes to run these events is so important. And we want everyone to discover the joy of a nice weekend ride.” The bright-eyed wonder with which Huw speaks about his heightened bushwalk ing-on-wheels experience would encourage any sane soul to dust off their neglected bike. Luckily, putting foot to pedal is a skill you’ll never forget.