Caravan Bikes offers full service mobile bike repair from your door

The following is a small interview with Pittsburgh’s newest entry into the bike repair scene – Caravan Bikes.  The ambitious and unique bike repair shop offers full service mobile bike repair, as in they will pick up your bike from your front door, fix it, and return it to you.

So, I’m James Lomuscio, I’m originally from Connecticut, but came out here as a student at Pitt to study neuroscience. I’m working on a business degree there now, too.

While I’ve never been known as a tree-hugger, throughout my life I’ve always hated waste – things thrown away when all they need is a quick repair, clothes regarded as junk because they’re out of fashion, functioning computers collecting dust only because they aren’t quite the fastest any longer, and the like – the list could go one for a quite a while. We’re so used to using a product once and then tossing it in the trash, never again to give it even a thought, that I’m convinced that mindset is seeping into our relationships with others. I can’t stand any of it.

Memorial Day of my senior year in high school I decided to have a little fun and collect empty soda cans at my town’s Memorial Day Fair. Each can fetches a nickle thanks to Connecticut’s recyclable redemption program, so by the end of the weekend I’d collected about $40 bucks. I used the money to buy a run down bike off of Craigslist. I fixed the bike, re-posted it to Craigslist, and sold it in an hour. I’d even routinely find bikes at the dump and fix them up. Had I not done that, they’d literally be trashed. This was the Summer of $5 gasoline, and I did pretty well – I sold dozens and dozens of bikes.

Coming to Pittsburgh as a student without a car and living off campus, it hit me again just how useful a bike can be, in spite of the road conditions or topography.

Occasionally a friend of mine would have work done on their bikes – simple repairs, mostly – and I was always astonished at just how much some of that work had cost them. I was more taken aback by the fact the vast majority of bike owners who needed repairs just looked for the closest shop. They didn’t call ahead and ask the cost of a tune up, and they didn’t even look around online to gauge the quality of the shop’s work – most people go to the closest shop, period. It makes sense though, as many riders are attached to their bikes because they have no other mode of transportation. So this is the market I think is out there, the market that I’m finding is indeed out there. There are riders looking for the most convenient, quality work at low cost. Without the overhead of a brick and mortar store, I can provide just that.

So, Caravan Bikes is a full service mobile bike repair shop. We pick up customers’ bikes from their homes (or wherever, really), fix them, and bring them back to their doorstep, usually the next day. We work pretty late into the night, doing pickups and drop offs in the evening, when most of our customers are home. We’ll work as late as 11pm.

I really hope that Caravan makes it easier for casual riders to get into the habit of biking in general. Often, the big hang up preventing riders getting back on the bike, after it’s been sitting in their garage for a few seasons, is the perceived inconvenience of having to get it fixed. Caravan Bikes allows them to sidestep those headaches and get riding again with little hassle. In fact, my second customer was just this type of person – she’d been thinking about trying to get back into biking after a decade or so, but the project kept getting pushed back because there were always more pressing things to do. It was when she saw a Caravan flier that she finally dusted off the bike and brought it out of the basement. That’s the impact I’d like Caravan Bikes to have, and I’m very happy to see that we’re already accomplishing that, even if only on a small scale right now.