About
Comfortable upright bikes for life
The Plain Bicycle's goal is to import everyday cycling culture to North America. We do it one container, hundreds of bikes and one smiling face at a time.
It started with a crazy plan
In 2017, we reached out to hundreds of people and crowdsourced the first container. Two hundred people signed up for a their very own random selection omafiets. The rest is bicycle history.
A symbol of cycling for the people
An omafiets is what some call a Dutch bike and what others call the best bike everyday bike in the world. To us, it represent the past, present and future of transportation. It is that one bicycle for any age, many abilities, for any day. Like an armchair floating through the clouds (but with a fenders), the Dutch bike puts you face to face with your city, and it is the antidote to a continent behaving as though cycling everyday has to be some kind of extreme sport.
Not Just Used Bikes – What else we do.
We aren’t afraid to say it: we have the world’s very best bicycles. And now we sell them new too. We sell one-of-a-kind transport bikes made by WorkCycles, for example. Just about the most bomb-proof bike on Earth. We tend to carry every type of Dutch bike you can imagine too. For families and commercial ventures, we began bringing in bakfiets (box bikes) and heavy duty upright tricycles like the classic Christinania (the SUV of Denmark). We now regularly supply customers throughout North America with the essential Dutch cycling accessories too (like racks, baskets, bells, kid carriers).
We do it for mode shift
We all know the planet needs a shift to cycling. Human powered transport can’t wait. When the bike boom becomes a bike era, it will arrive on an omafiets. And we want you to be part of it.
We speak up
We take urbanism best practices seriously. We demand high quality bike lanes because we know that’s all that really stands between you and riding any bike, any day. This did not start as a bike shop. It started as a culture bomb.
Riding in the snow
The omafiets is the Best. Winter. Bike. Ever. So we speak up on that too, because if anyone knows winter, we do. We may not treat snow with the respect it deserves in many Canadian cities, but we that others have shown snow is an incredible building material and bike path surface, when you treat it right.
Glide and ride
When the pandemic stuck in the middle of winter, we decided to do something special, and began to bring in equipment like Nordic skates and kicksleds. In 2020, we started a by-donation ski equipment library.
Our non-profit work
We’re a social enterprise. That means we’re run by a non-profit and every dollar we make goes back into ushering a new normal where cycling every day is easy. We directly support the work of Winnipeg Trails. You can visit Winnipeg Trails to learn more.
Ready to make your life even better?
Its time to get yourself a Dutch bike. We ship our bikes across Canada. If you are lucky enough to live in our hometown of Winnipeg, Canada, please come into one of our stores and ride something. We just might change how you see cycling.