Reinventing the Wheel

When Tom Ritchey, one of the inventors of the mountain bike, was on a cycle tour in Rwanda in December of 2005, he noted most of the nation’s half-million coffee growers were hauling their crop to market on bicycles made of wood or spare parts welded together. In this “Land of a Thousand Hills,” such primitive bikes often resulted in the coffee losing its freshness and value before reaching the market.

It would do little good, Ritchey figured, to gather up used bicycles in the U.S. and ship them to Africa; Rwanda lacks the skilled mechanics and bike shops necessary to retrofit the bikes for such heavy-duty work. “You have to approach it from a different angle,” Ritchey says. “You have to design and build a bicycle that works for the local population.”

So, working at the drawing board of his garage in Woodside, California, Ritchey designed what he calls a “coffee bike,” sort of a two-wheeled version of an SUV (shown in photo). The heavy-duty cargo bike features an extended rear rack designed to carry loads of up to 300 pounds. Ritchey is now teaming up with the largest coffee-growers co-op in Rwanda to help get the crop to market faster, and is making plans to create a factory in which to build the coffee bikes. This is all part of what has become known as Project Rwanda, which also includes an Olympic-calibre bicycle-racing team, preparing for the Beijing Olympics in 2008.