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Students and Harvard affiliates gathered on the Quad lawn Sunday afternoon to kick off Quad Bikes programming for the semester.

Quad Bikes — founded in the early 2000s by a Cabot House aide — hired students through work study and offered free bike repair services out of the basement of Cabot’s Elliot Hall for almost two decades, up until the Covid-19 pandemic.

“It shut down in 2020 with Covid, among other things, and was on a kind of involuntary hiatus for a while,” said current Quad Bikes lead Miah Ebels-Duggan ’27.

In the fall of 2022, Julian Li ’25 and a group of students reopened Quad Bikes, keeping the shop open by obtaining grants and training volunteer mechanics.

“We are a club within Cabot House right now, and our main goal is just to teach people how to fix bikes, how to take care of their bikes, how to ride safely in the city,” Ebels-Duggan said.

In addition to socials like the kickoff, Quad Bikes will offer weekly open stand hours where Harvard affiliates can bring their bikes in for free repairs and learn to fix them with help from experienced mechanics. They also host group bike rides, including an upcoming bike tour of Allston and Brighton in collaboration with local organizations.

For many students, Quad Bikes has been their introduction to bike repair. Amy Kaniper ’26 discovered Quad Bikes during her sophomore year.

“My tire got run over — my wheel on my bike — and this was before I cared about bike repair at all or anything, so I just went to Quad Bikes with my bent wheel, and they replaced it for me,” Kaniper said.

Since then, Kaniper has spent time in the summer learning how to repair her own bike and paying visits to Somerville Bike Kitchen to get the necessary parts.

For students living in the Quad, Quad Bikes has been a convenient and useful resource.

“I think it’s incredible to be able to just walk out my front door and get bike help rather than having to commute to go somewhere,” said Gabi Augustyn ’28. “It’s really convenient. Makes life a lot easier, especially when living in the Quad can be a bit of an inconvenience sometimes.”

While Quad Bikes is a volunteer-run club, it has been able to form an inventory of used parts from old and donated bikes that are used to refurbish the bikes that come into the shop for service.

According to Ebels-Duggan, Quad Bikes used to have a partnership with HUPD that brought parts from abandoned bikes.

Looking to the future, Ebels-Duggan hopes to make Quad Bikes “established in a formal way that will give it longevity.”

“I think that what we saw before Covid was that making this a place that students could have a job on campus and also be part of a community was a really big part of keeping this going, and what we’ve seen since then is that some folks just operating kind of on a shoestring budget without the ability to hire motivated and talented students has made the shop really struggle,” they said.

Ebels-Duggan added that they want Quad Bikes to become “the center of the bike community on campus.”

“I want this to be a place where folks can come in and learn, where folks can come in and help their peers, and just hang out at events like this,” they said.

—Staff writer Nirja J. Trivedi can be reached at nirja.trivedi@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @nirjatriv.