Before

Collect junk bikes and set the bar low. Ask on local listings, ask friends with full basements, or ask neighbors. Aim for six to ten bikes.

Get a bike shop or someone with tools and experience involved before you pick up a paintbrush; making the bikes ridable is the part artists can't do alone. Buy cheap, plentiful decorations: yarn, colored duct tape, pipe cleaners, puff balls, rhinestones, glue, and spray paint. Nothing here should feel precious enough to be careful with.

Set the build sessions and the lending days up in Plurality, and use the Needs tab for donated bikes, supplies, helmets, a floor pump, and a repair stand. Sort out a simple waiver before you lend to strangers. Print your flyers to invite neighbors to each session.

During

Ask the personality question and let it be the whole brief: look at the bike and work out who it is. For folks decorating their own, Modern's prompt is the one to use: “This is your friend, your trusted companion who gets you around, so what's its personality like?”

Name every bike out loud and let the names be joyful. The neighborhood will love their new cast of characters, and a bike called The Pretty Lady gets ridden more than a bike called number four.

Put something on at least one bike that carries local memory: an old yearbook, a photo album, a set of postcards from the town. Then lend them free and check them each time they go out and come back. Offer a helmet to everybody, and give the nervous adult a quiet minute and a hand on the saddle. That person is who this exists for.

After

Ride out together. The parade is the civic half of the project, and it works because it makes biking visible to the people who claim nobody bikes here. Keep it small, keep it slow, keep it obviously joyful.

Photograph every rider with their bike and invite folks to record any other Moments. A grown adult grinning on a bicycle covered in puff balls recruits better than any flyer.

Take the fleet out to block parties, festivals, and schools, and run decoration sessions where kids bring their own bikes. When it becomes a regular thing, start a Group in Plurality to organize the builds and the rides.