Journal Category: Anti-racism

There’s a sign on our door. It says Black Lives Matter, and below that it says this is a safe space, and below that it says Nazis are not welcome. It’s been there since before we opened. Some people walk in anyway and tell us it’s too political. We tell them, politely, that it’s actually the least political thing in the building — it’s just us saying who we are.

Why we put it in writing

Because silence is a choice. The average bike shop is a white dude space. Not always on purpose, not always with malice, but by default — by what’s on the walls, by who gets ignored when they walk in, by what music is playing, by how the staff talks to a 55-year-old Latina asking about cruisers versus how they talk to a 28-year-old white guy asking about gravel bikes. That default costs people. It costs them comfort, access, money, and eventually it costs them cycling altogether. We didn’t want to run that shop.

“A shop that doesn’t say anything says something. We decided to say the thing.”
— Dan

What a shop owes its street

We’re on South 4th Avenue. That’s not an accident. Our neighbors are working families, renters, students, retirees on fixed incomes, people who need a bike to get to work and can’t afford to have it down for two weeks while some shop orders a part from their one distributor. A bike shop that serves that street needs to actually serve that street — not perform accessibility in a press release and then charge $150 for a basic tune-up.

Gatekeeping in cycling is real and it is expensive. It shows up in the language — performance components, entry-level (said like an insult), serious cyclists — and it shows up in who gets eye contact when they walk through the door. We try to notice when we’re doing it and stop. We don’t always get it right. But we’ve made it a practice to ask ourselves: who is this shop for? And the answer we keep coming back to is: everyone who needs a bike to move through this city.

The practical stuff

Here’s what anti-racism looks like in a bike shop on a Tuesday afternoon:

• We greet every customer the same way, regardless of what they’re wearing or what bike they rode in on.
• We explain things without condescending. You can ask us what a derailleur is and we will tell you without making a face.
• We stock bikes under $300 because that’s what a lot of our neighbors can spend.
• We do free safety checks — no purchase required, no up-sell, just come in.
• We donate a percentage of every sale to local organizations doing equity work. See our journal for the current list.

None of that is heroic. It’s just running a shop that actually gives a damn. The sign on the door is the easy part. The hard part is the daily practice of making sure the shop behind it earns it. We’re working on that every day. Come find us at the shop or call us at 520-365-0754 — whoever answers will be glad you called.

Cycling has a gatekeeping problem. It’s not unique to cycling — plenty of outdoor sports have the same disease — but cycling’s version is particularly well-dressed and expensive and self-righteous about it, and that combination makes it harder to call out. So let’s call it out.

Kit culture is a dress code, and dress codes are about exclusion

There’s an unspoken rule in certain cycling circles that says you’re not a real cyclist unless you’re wearing the right clothes. Bib shorts with a chamois. A jersey with pockets. Clipless pedals — and God help you if you call them “clipless” without knowing why they’re called that. Matching helmet. Cycling-specific sunglasses. The total cost of entry to look right on a group ride can easily run $500 before you even touch a bike. And if you show up in basketball shorts on a flat-bar hybrid, you can feel it — the glances, the condescension, the way people drift ahead when you’re trying to keep up.

“Nobody needs bib shorts to ride a bike. The bib shorts are a signal, not a tool. The signal is: do you belong here?”

Price as a structural barrier

The average new bike sold at a traditional bike shop in 2024 costs over $1,000. The average American worker makes about $23 an hour. Do the math. A “starter” road bike at a boutique shop is 40-plus hours of labor for someone at median wage — and that’s before you add a helmet, a lock, lights, and a tune-up after six months. The industry has convinced itself that this is just the cost of quality, but what it’s actually done is sorted cycling into a leisure activity for people with disposable income, and left everyone else on Walmart bikes with no support when those bikes inevitably fall apart.

That’s why we exist. Our shop floor is built around used bikes in the $150–$500 range, inspected, adjusted, and ready to ride. Not every bike is a project bike. Not every customer has a Saturday afternoon and a YouTube education in bottom bracket threads. Some people just need a bike that works, priced like something a person can actually buy.

Jargon as a gate

This one is sneakier. Cycling language was invented by cyclists for cyclists, and that’s fine, but it gets weaponized. Someone walks in and asks for a “regular bike” and a shop employee launches into a Socratic dialogue about riding style, terrain preference, and Q-factor. That’s not helpful. That’s performance. Real help sounds like: “Tell me where you’re riding and how far, and I’ll show you three bikes that might work.”

Here’s the actual minimum vocabulary you need to interact with LoBall:

• Bike — you have one or want one. That’s it.
• Broken — something’s wrong. Bring it in.
• Ride — what you do on the bike. We want to know where.

Everything else we’ll explain as we go. No quiz at the door. No eyebrows raised at your terminology. Our service desk runs the same way — tell us what’s wrong in whatever words you have, and we’ll figure it out together. That’s the shop we want to be. Call us at 520-365-0754 if you want to talk it through before you come in.

This is a list of organizations doing work we believe in, and what we do with or for them. It’s a partial list because the full list would take longer to write than this post, and because the work changes — organizations grow, shift focus, merge, dissolve, get defunded, restart under new names. We update this when we can. If we’ve missed someone doing good work in Tucson, tell us and we’ll look into it.

Organizations we donate to directly

• Barrio Bicicletas Collective — A community repair collective operating out of the Barrio Viejo neighborhood. They do free repair clinics on weekend mornings and build up donated bikes for people who can’t afford to buy. We send them parts and occasionally a mechanic for their bigger events.
• Desert Roots Mutual Aid — A Tucson-based mutual aid network focused on food and transportation access in the South Side and Midvale Park neighborhoods. We’ve donated bikes for their volunteer delivery program and we refer people to them when they’re looking for more than just a bike.
• Frontera Bike Project — Works at the intersection of migrant community support and cycling access. They run basic repair workshops in multiple languages and have a small lending library of tools for community members without their own. We do an annual parts drive for them every October.
• South Tucson Youth Rides — A youth program that gets kids on bikes in the South Tucson area, with an emphasis on traffic safety and bike maintenance as a life skill. We’ve donated bikes, hosted shop tours, and sent Dan to do a basic-maintenance demo for their summer program.

“Mutual aid isn’t charity. Charity maintains the gap. Mutual aid tries to close it. We try to be clear about which one we’re doing.”
— Dan

Rides we organize for or ride alongside

Several times a year we participate in or help organize rides with a civic or community purpose. Past examples include a ride to the polls during local elections (nonpartisan logistics, partisan enthusiasm), a Day of the Dead memorial ride through the Southside, and a summer safety ride with Desert Roots that doubled as a community introduction to the neighborhood’s new bike infrastructure.

How this connects to the shop

A percentage of every sale at LoBall goes toward this work. It’s not a huge percentage — we’re a small shop and margins on used bikes aren’t fat — but it’s consistent and it’s written into how we operate, not treated as optional based on whether it was a good month. If you’ve ever bought a bike from us or had your bike serviced at our service counter, some of that money went somewhere in this list.

If you want to get more involved — volunteering, donating parts, coming to a community ride — reach out through our contact page or call 520-365-0754. We can usually point you in a useful direction.

A few years back the shop had a cluster of yard signs in the window. You know the kind — the small corrugated plastic ones that list a series of values, formatted like a creed, all starting with “We believe.” They were well-intentioned. They were also, if we’re being honest with ourselves, performance. They cost us nothing and they said nothing specific about what we actually do. Anybody can put a sign in a window. We took them down.

The problem with performance

We’re not opposed to signage. The sign on our door still says what it says about who’s welcome and who isn’t. That sign is specific — it names something. The yard signs were different. “We believe in kindness” is not a commitment. It’s a vibe. A shop that discriminates against customers could hang that sign and it would be true by some reading. “We believe in science” doesn’t tell you anything about what we actually do differently because we believe in science. The signs had migrated from meaning into decoration, and decoration that signals virtue is worse than no sign at all because it lets you off the hook.

“The question isn’t what do you believe. The question is what do you do, specifically, on a Tuesday afternoon, when it’s hard or inconvenient. That’s not something a yard sign can say.”
— Dan

What’s in the window now

The front window of LoBall has:

• The “Nazis Not Welcome” door sign, still there, still specific
• A hand-lettered board listing the community organizations we currently donate to (updated quarterly)
• A paper flyer for whatever community ride or event is coming up
• A price list for our most common services, because transparency about cost is an act of respect for people who need to budget
• Occasionally: a kid’s drawing, if a kid brought one in and it was good enough to go up

Less performance, more practice

The shift we’ve tried to make — and it’s ongoing, not finished — is from announcing values to practicing them. That means the free safety checks we do for anyone who walks in, regardless of purchase. It means the mechanic who takes 20 extra minutes with a customer who doesn’t speak much English to make sure they understand what we did to their bike and why. It means the price list in the window, because hidden pricing is a power move and we don’t want that power over our customers. It means the organizations on the board actually getting a check, not just a mention.

None of this makes us the perfect shop. We make mistakes. We have blind spots. We’re working on it. But the working on it is the thing — not the announcement of it. If you want to talk about any of it, you know where we are. Contact us here, or come by, or call 520-365-0754. The door’s open.