Trailer Club Homepage

Trailer Club takes the concept of the city car club (see for example http://www.carshareclubs.org.uk/carclubs/index.htm) and extends it to cycle freight.

The basic concept is simple:

You join your local trailer club. The club owns/rents lockup space within a five minute bike ride of your home/work base.

At the lockup there are (minimum):

You ride there, and either hitch up a trailer, or leave your bike safely locked, and mount up on your rig of choice.

Do the thing you have to do; then put it back, pick up your bike, ride home happy.

Booking

We'll keep the booking simple at first: just give everyone a key and a simple email list on which members indicate rough times that they're using the equipment. If there started to be pressure on the facility we could formalise booking using the web.

Premises

A key issue. In Hackney the cycling campaign is working on getting the council's working definition of what constitutes a vehicle to include a bicycle so that we can collaborate with them in renovating and re-renting disused garage/lockup space for cycle use. Running water and electricity would be a plus.

Money

I am seeking public funding to help the project, but the capital costs are not great in any case. £5k plus £100/month would definitely be enough to get started on the pilot example. If we aim for 20 founder members that's 250ukp each plus a fiver a month. Sounds reasonable to me.

Management

Small scale benevolent dictatorship with intermittent bursts of democracy when anyone can be bothered.

Potential synergies

We also hope to provide space for Hackney's refugee cycle project. In the past we have dreamt of a cycle culture centre to provide a base for cycle training for utility and leisure. Cycleactive, our local cycling as exercise prescription project could be based there. DC 05/11/2002