Center for Appropriate Transport

The Center for Appropriate Transport (CAT) is an innovative non-profit community center, dedicated to bicycles and alternative transport. It is near the most extensive river bike trail in the US, at 1st and Washington in Eugene, Oregon.

Inside CAT, one can find educational workshops for teaching the design and manufacture of special-purpose bikes, as well as a repair collective, a bike and bike-rack machine-shop, a bike museum, an odd-bike rental facility, and Oregon's primary cycling publication, Oregon Cycling. CAT is also home to Pedaler's Express, a pioneering workbike-based delivery service. CAT has inspired hundreds of similar projects, and centers, since its inception in 1992.

CAT exists because Jan VanderTuin came to Eugene in 1990. He's a human-powerd vehicle engineer with an activist background, who's best previous success was as co-founder of the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) movement in the US. He was searching for colleagues in Eugene, and an approach to promoting workbike use and manufacture in Eugene. He first worked with the Burley Co-op, which makes tandems, raingear and bike-trailers in Eugene, but VanderTuin's extensive plans were considered by many co-op members to be outside Burley's focus.

Sharing space with recumbent designer Dick Ryan, who was also in Eugene at the time, VanderTuin gathered a support group, to help him figure out how best to spread the "workbike gospel". He convinced a number of people that load-bearing bicycles could replace cars in a bike-friendly city like Eugene. This group included Dick Ryan, bicycle retailer/activist Kurt Jensen, writer/racer Jason Moore, activist/builder/entrepreneur Tom Bowerman, and Rain Magazine editors Greg Bryant and Danielle Janes. Greg Bryant proposed a center, based on a series of interviews with VanderTuin, that would combine Rain Magazine's appropriate technology background with VanderTuin's bicycle activism and manufacturing. Inevitably, with further conversations among the group, the center's focus became bicycles, and VanderTuin and Bryant named the new center CAT after earlier, Shumacher-tyle "Small is Beautiful" projects in the UK and US. Tom Bowerman then secured and rennovated an abandoned sheet-metal shop in the Whitaker neighborhood in Eugene, and CAT was born.

It opened its doors to the public on November 20, 1992.