About Free Ride Charitable Trust

Free Ride is a charitable trust set up to increase bike riding for transportation, recreation and fitness. The trust aims to provide services and support for riders in Lower Hutt in the aims of increasing access to cycling.

Charities number CC61653

The trustees are:

Lily Chalmers

Martin Warr

Cr Simon Edwards

Matthew Young

Free Ride operates a membership which anyone can sign up to, to get access to free and discounted services to reduce barriers to cycling. We are funded by Hutt City Council, Waka Kotahi, and the donations and koha of our members and supporters.

Our free services include:

Free bikes

Free kids bike fixing

Free fix ups at community events

Free bike skills courses

Free mechanic mentoring in our workshop.

Access to an E-bike library.

Free Ride currently operates the Free Ride Workshop at The Naenae Park Pavillion, Gibson Crescent, Naenae . We also do a range of more mobile programmes, see our landing page for our events and dates.

Bike services for koha

We have limited capacity to fix and service bikes on Saturdays, so if you agree to leave your bike, it might take a couple of weeks to get it back, depending on availability of parts and labour.

Payment

We are working on becoming a sustainable social enterprise. We have free options available, and we have paid services. We offer an affordable bike service price, and paid e-bike group rides for those people who can afford to pay to support our charity.

We ask for a donation on a sliding scale for bike services, we will give you the parts cost and labour cost and you can pay what you can. This can vary from a standard bike service and check to more complex fixes and parts replacement. We are very flexible and can always come to an arrangement if you can't pay then and there.

If you have any questions, please ask. Mostly we are figuring this out to make things work best for our community.

Healthy Families

“Transport equity is a key focus for Healthy Families Hutt Valley. Increasing access and the use of low carbon, low cost transport options, like bikes, is great for our whānau and our environment."

Media links

Stuff

"Hard infrastructure needs to be backed up with initiatives that encourage and enable cycling, particularly in areas where people otherwise wouldn’t have the means to get themselves mobile."

Daily Encourager

“The benefits of Free Ride are more open access to cycling and being part of a community of cyclists.”

Our Team.

Our team is a dedicated bunch of people who work together to deliver Free Ride services. We contract some of these roles, but most Free Ride team members are volunteers. We are always looking for more good people to help us in the workshop or behind the scenes, get in touch with Lily if you are interested in becoming a volunteer.