PROFILE
Camille Raneem Fixes Bikes and Bad Days
You worked as a messenger before you opened your shop. What did you deliver?
A lot of film footage on hard drives. Boxes of wine, liquor, and beer on the cargo bike. And, of course, catered lunches.
What is your bike commute like now?
I currently have what might be the shortest bike commute in the city. I live in southeast Greenpoint and I bike to work at the shop on the other side of the neighborhood, in west Greenpoint. But I used to live at my family’s house up in Washington Heights and would commute to Tribeca every day — a 22-mile round trip. I definitely miss having the excuse to get in those miles. It was a perfect way to cut my teeth and get accustomed to bike commuting.
Any tips for people who are nervous about getting started?
When customers ask about how to adjust, I admit my deepest darkest newbie secret. Before I moved back in with my family in Washington Heights, I lived Crown Heights and worked in Williamsburg. I was gifted my first bike, but I was so frightened of riding in unprotected lanes that I would literally walk my bike all the way down Fulton Street until I got to the Bedford Avenue bike lane. I had to give myself an extra 20 minutes to get to work. It is okay to treat it as a learning process. I also tell them to bring their bike into the shop if they are struggling. If you feel something is not working well on your bike, it’s important to talk to a professional about it.
Why does the shop specialize in cargo bikes?
I definitely think that they are the machines of the future, but it has been a hard rollout for a couple of reasons. When I first started riding cargo bikes in 2014, it was a good way to be able to advocate that your labor was worth a little bit more than strapping a gigantic parcel to your back and risking life and limb. Businesses were willing to use me to offer delivery services on a local basis, because it made more sense than hiring people with vans, it was good advertising, and it showed that you cared about the community and being innovative about how you perform logistics. Unfortunately, since that time, we’ve just been completely overrun by Uber. Our original business plan, to build a new green city where we have tons of couriers working all over the city, became unsustainable. Now it’s all drivers as opposed to couriers, and courier jobs have really shrunk. There are huge sustainability issues that have to do with the devaluing of service labor, the retail recession, and the competition with cars.
Kween Kargo may be New York City’s most unique bike shop name. Where did it originate?
When I was working as a courier, I listened to a lot of Beyonce and Janelle Monáe — feel-good, empowering music. That drove me to want to incorporate the idea of a queen, especially because, in cycling, we have so many different quasi-kings, but do not see much female, or gender-diverse, or gender-nonconforming representation. I liked the tongue-in-cheek wordplay on the Royal We. What if the Royal We was more about channeling a collective voice as opposed to people wanting to rule? Our whole thing is trying to build a common crown for everybody to wear, make sure that everybody is riding well-maintained machines and can go about their business in a liberated, sustainable, and healthy way.
Why embrace politics as a part of your business model?
While cycling is definitely a sport where you find bigwigs on Wall Street who ride their road bikes on the weekend, bikes are also a reliable, valuable piece of machinery that a lot of working class people use as a vehicle of opportunity, whether it be for work, to get to and from work, or maybe even just relax and get away from things for a little bit. As mechanics, we find ourselves interacting with the most vulnerable people that cycling interacts with. A lot of the people who come through our shop are working cyclists — delivery cyclists, couriers, and folks who otherwise would be spending $2.75 twice a day for the subway to spend too much of their valuable time getting back and forth to a job that does not value them. Cycling provides them a more direct and freeing way to go about their everyday life.
The personal is political. My business partner and I see how cycling intersects with race and class because, as working class people of color, we have had those same experiences with bikes and that is what brought us into bikes. It is really important for us, if we are going to be in business, to do it for the moral reasons that brought us into it. We just want other people to be as stoked about bikes as we are.
You have been vocally opposed to the e-bike crackdown. Tell me why.
It is absolutely absurd that e-bikes are not legal. But, I will be honest, I actually have an issue with e-bikes — not because I think they are dangerous, but I think that they are a tool to devalue the labor of delivery workers. As somebody who did a lot of these jobs and has delivered a lot of stuff, a cargo bike operator cannot compete with the labor prices of what restaurants will offer these guys with the e-bikes. So they are legally in a bad spot, working at a fever-pace because they have a motor under them and they are perceived as being able to work more, and not getting paid enough for it. We need to stop criminalizing delivery riders, stop criminalizing cyclists, and actually criminalize the people who make our streets unsafe. But that is a different issue from making sure that workers in our city are protected and that people are making a living wage.
I remember one night when I was locking up the shop, this delivery cyclist on an e-bike got bumped from the rear by a van that was driving behind him and he spun out. Someone told him they had already called an ambulance, and the delivery cyclist gets completely freaked out. He just kept looking at his hands in absolute horror, because he very clearly broke both of his hands, but he said, if they just called somebody, he had to go — and somehow he got back on his bike and went. I think about that story a lot, because so often our customers are between a rock and a hard place, and sometimes even just getting the care that they need can be terrifying and threatening.
That is horrific. As a bike mechanic and a business owner, do you feel you have a role to play in changing the culture that allows things like that to happen?
My business partner puts it best. He says that a lot of times it does not feel like we run a business, it feels like we are doing a social good, because when people come into the bike shop, they are usually having a bad day. Usually, something went wrong. A lot of times, what we are doing is not just fixing people’s bikes but giving them the confidence to get back out there. Even though the world is not fair, and it is dangerous, we are all in it together, and we all hope that we make it home every day.
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