New St. Andrews Boulevard bike shop to focus on repair and service
By Jonathan Allen

Greg Jones grew up in West Ashley and started riding bicycles competitively about 15 years ago.

For the past several years he’s run a bike service and repair business out of his James Island home, but this month he’s opening a new shop in West Ashley at 1055 St. Andrews Blvd.

Ride Bikes will be the area’s exclusive Scott bicycle dealer, and Jones will also sell other new and used bikes and biking accessories. The store will also feature a service and repair shop.

“I started off looking for a small space, I even looked in Park Circle, and I still think that would be a good spot for a bike shop,” Jones said. “But I figured this was close enough for people coming from James Island, downtown and North Charleston. It’s easy access.”

Jones purchased the building that was the former home of International Cash Registers and was originally built in the 1960s and has spent the last few months cleaning it up, painting it and getting it ready to open to the public.

He had hoped to be open before now, but had to jump through several bureaucratic hoops to obtain a business license and certificate of occupancy for the location because despite being a commercial property for more than 50 years, the parcel on which Ride Bikes sits was zoned for residential uses.

“We had to get it grandfathered in and that took a while,” Jones said.

This is Jones’ first entrepreneurial venture, but he has been working on bicycles and in bike shops for more than a decade.

“I started riding competitively as a kid,” he said. “I started off with BMX and progressed to mountain biking and racing.”

While he was riding he was also working at places like The Bicycle Shoppe and the Charleston Bicycle Company. After the Charleston Bicycle Company closed Jones started servicing and repairing bikes at home. Now he’s ready to run his own shop.

In addition to the new Scott bikes and some other mass market bicycle companies like Sun Bicycles that he plans to carry, Jones picks up used bicycles where ever he can find them, be it a garage sale or a thrift store, and restores them. When his doors open Jones will have more than a dozen used bikes on display, including some vintage models from the 70s or earlier. All of them have been taking up space in his garage.

He will also take used bikes in as trade at the store and may sell some on consignment, and Jones said he guarantees all the service, repair and restoration work.

Ride Bikes will carry both children’s and adult bikes from the low-end entry level styles to the higher-end professional racers.

Jones said the recent additions of bike lanes to St. Andrews Boulevard and plans for more crossing the Ashley River bridge are great news for biking enthusiasts and anyone who wants to give two-wheeled self-propelled transportation another shot. He wants to see more and has been working to get full-fledged bike lanes rather than a separate bike path included in the plans for road improvements on Harborview Road on James Island.

Eventually Jones also plans to host weekly bike rides from the shop, which happens to be located very close to the West Ashley Bike Path, and not far from the West Ashley Greenway.

Originally run on the West Ashley Patch website:
http://westashley.patch.com/articles/ride-bikes-set-to-open-soon-in-west-ashley