SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT. Now students and staff can perform simple bike repairs at Medicinareberget. The new bicycle workshop, which has tools and materials available, is accessible from seven in the morning until ten at night. The university’s climate fund supports the initiative.
Leading his bicycle, Mats Sandberg shows the way to the bicycle workshop. At the back of Zoologen, next to the Wallenberg Conference Center, the bicycle workshop has now opened. Employees and students receive free access here to tools and materials every day between 7:00 and 22:00. Hold your card against the card reader, enter your code and the door to the workshop opens. One of the cabinets in here is unlocked; another is secured with a combination lock that you can open with the code that Sandberg will send you if you e-mail him.
Bike year-round
Mats Sandberg, who initiated the bicycle workshop, is an environmental coordinator at Sahlgrenska Academy. He has been a year-round cyclist for 30 years and knows that sometimes you need to tighten a chain, repair a puncture or fix a brake that has started to malfunction.
“With the winter season approaching, this is a good place to change to winter tires,” Sandberg notes.
More and more people are discovering what a good means of transportation biking is, and to avoid accidents, it is important for the bicycle to work properly. The majority of all bicycle accidents that occur are single accidents that are often caused by a brake malfunctioning or the chain suddenly jumping off.”
The safety aspect is one of the reasons the university is investing in the bicycle workshop for employees and students, and of course this also ties in with environmental work. The initiative includes an additional bicycle repair site outdoors, by Medicinaregatan 11, with access to simple tools and an air pump. The workshop has been able to open thanks to grants from the university’s climate fund and Akademiska Hus, which provides free space for the workshop on the premises.
Do you want to hold a workshop?
“The idea is that you can come here and work on your bike, but it would be great if an interested student or employee would like to hold a workshop, where cyclists can learn more about how to take care of their bikes,” Sandberg thinks. He would also like to see bicycle events like the “Re:Cycle” events Chalmers University of Technology often arranges.
“They collect old bicycles that have been salvaged by property owners, so the participants can each take a bike and fix it themselves. And the bikes that nobody takes home with them are fixed up anyway and donated to refugee housing. At Chalmers this is a major bike event, and it would be fun if we could do something similar, although on a smaller scale.”
Eric Hanse, assistant dean for premises matters, is pleased that the bicycle workshop has now opened:
“I hope that this initiative will be an important step in increasing the incentive to bike to Medicinareberget, and I also believe that the workshop has an important symbolic value, because it shows that Sahlgrenska Academy has bicyclists in mind.
TEXT AND PHOTO: ELIN LINDSTRÖM
Here you can see a short film (in Swedish) where Mats Sandberg gives us a guided tour in our new bike workshop:
