Pure Detroit has a real interesting interview with Shayne O’Keefe and his bike-based food delivery service called Hot Spokes.

We had mentioned this back in January but the interview provides the back story to the operation.

PD: When did cycling become a major element in your life?
O’Keefe: I got into bikes pretty recently. I’d always liked bikes, but I was just at this place in my life where I wasn’t doing anything really constructive…  I had heard about Back Alley Bikes in 2007, which is a volunteer program. You can go in there and do work trades in exchange to learn how to work on bikes. So, I started going there and I loved it. I met all of these strange, exciting people. They weren’t people that looked like they would be in my peer group. It was really great. I eventually earned a bike. I went and picked out this busted old ten speed and started learning how to work on it. It took me months to build it … but it definitely awakened something in me. My friends were all super jealous, wondering where I was and what I was doing.

And it looks like our old article is out of date. Hot Spokes now delivers from Shangri La which  has replaced the now closed Salad Creations. Cass Cafe and Union Street still round out the options.

The interview does make the case that living in Detroit can be inexpensive, especially without a car. That’s certainly attracting artists, but also enabling some bike-based entrepreneurs like Hot Spokes and Mr. Bow Tie.

And we learned about Malcolm Carey and his Mr. Bow Tie business from a MetroTimes article by Detroitblogger John.

You can’t miss him because he shouts at passing traffic through a megaphone. Or he dances on the grass, whirling a sign in his hands, volunteering his skills. Sometimes he blurs by on his bicycle, pulling a wagon festooned with two banners advertising his work.

He’s offering a single service — cleaning dirty headlights. Nothing else. Regardless of how the rest of the car looks.

There are more photos of Mr. Bow Tie in action on detroitblog.

Thanks to Wheelhouse Detroit for sharing that Pure Detroit link on Facebook and giving us something to write about.

Tags: Detroit, Hot Spokes, Midtown

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 19th, 2011 at 9:33 am and is filed under Detroit. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.