Chris Broughton, a longtime Baltimore-area cyclist, has been a customer of the Federal Hill Trek store since before it was a Trek store.

The shop on Key Highway was locally owned by Race Pace Bicycles for decades, until Trek acquired it in 2022.

Broughton purchased seven bikes there and relied on its longtime mechanic, Lisa Santos.

Now, that location is set to close Oct. 11 and stopped servicing bikes Tuesday.

“It’s sad for Baltimore,” said Jonathan Braymer, the store’s manager. “It hurts to say sorry and turn [customers] away.”

Trek Bicycle Corp., based in Wisconsin, is an international bike manufacturer and retailer with hundreds of stores in North America. It also sells to independent bicycle retailers.

Race Pace, which opened in 1978 in a West Baltimore rowhouse, had seven Baltimore-area locations and was an independent Trek retailer when the cycling giant acquired it.

Explaining the Federal Hill closure, Will Wherritt, district manager of Baltimore area Trek stores, said, “We came up on the end of our lease.”

“Retail space is expensive, and margins are thin in the bike industry,” he said.

Wherritt said the Federal Hill shop’s employees will be relocated to Trek’s Towson and Ellicott City locations, and that its manager will become the manager of the Towson store.

But Santos, a beloved bike mechanic of two decades in the city, said she was told there is no place for her in other Trek stores.

Baltimore’s biking community is lamenting the loss, saying it is especially painful because the Federal Hill Trek store was the last remaining bike shop in South Baltimore.

Baltimore has seen numerous bike shops shutter in recent years: Federal Hill’s Light Street Cycles, Hampden’s 20/20 Cycles, Harbor East’s Handle Bar Cafe, and Joe’s Bike Shop’s Fells Point location.

The Trek store in Charles Village closed earlier this year.

“It’s the first time in a while that big swaths of Baltimore just doesn’t have a bike shop,” said Alex Ajayi, president of Velocipede Bike Project, a nonprofit, volunteer-run DIY bike shop on 22nd Street in Old Goucher.

Wherritt said that while Trek will no longer have a presence in the city, the company will focus on its Towson and Ellicott City locations.

“It sucks for customers who can’t commute using a broken bike to Towson,” Santos said.

From the Trek store, Santos was able to take bike donations and fix them up for people in need of reliable transportation in the community.

Roughly half of the people who brought their bikes for service at the Federal Hill Trek location could not afford other forms of transportation in the city, estimated Kevin Patierno, a part-time bike mechanic there.

Both Velocipede and Baltimore Bicycle Works, the closest full-service bike shop to Federal Hill, are more than three miles — at least a 20-minute ride — away, a challenge if a bike is your primary form of transportation and it’s busted.

“People are frustrated and concerned,” said Bernardo Vigil, who works at and co-owns Baltimore Bicycle Works, a collective located on Falls Road near Penn Station.

He said the “cascade of closures” has worsened Baltimoreans’ ability to rely on biking as a form of transportation.

The local closings are part of a national trend across the outdoor industry. Bike sales boomed during the pandemic but have taken a nosedive in more recent years.

Now the bike market is flooded with used bicycles and tempered by low consumer demand. That leaves bike shops in a tight squeeze to keep up with rent and the salaries of skilled bike mechanics. Competition with online purchases, including the growing popularity of lower-cost, direct-to-consumer e-bikes, also has hurt bike retailers, local owners say.

Baltimore Bicycle Works is closing its Belvedere Square location in North Baltimore in mid-October while expanding its Falls Road location.

Baltimore is behind peer cities in accessibility by bike, said Jed Weeks, executive director of Bikemore, an advocacy group.

While the U.S. average for bike shops per capita is 1.1 per 100,000 people in a city, Baltimore’s average is 0.8 per 100,000.

“Bike shops rely on new riders for existence,” Weeks said. “If you build separated infrastructure, they will come.”

Weeks and other bike advocates have long argued that building more protected bike lanes will encourage more people to get on bikes, benefiting area bike shops.

Cora Karim chose to leave behind her car and move to Baltimore from Florida this past year, in part because of the accessibility of biking as a form of transportation. On her fixed-gear bike, Karim commutes from North Fells Point to work in Charles North nearly every day.

She has relied on Baltimore Bicycle Works in Station North to purchase accessories, such as bike locks, and for essential maintenance like tune-ups.

Without Baltimore Bicycle Works and the bike lanes Karim uses to get there, “it would make my bike inaccessible,” she said.

Many believe there’s still a market for a bike shop in South Baltimore — just not a corporate one.

“My impression from day one was that Trek didn’t understand the Baltimore market and they didn’t care,” said Lars Peterson, a former Race Pace employee and member of the board for Velocipede.

Alex Obrecht, former owner of Race Pace Bicycles and a Westminster native, said that per an agreement with Trek, he is unable to comment on the company’s business for five years from the time of the acquisition.

Peterson said he believes a shop in Baltimore “needs to have the willingness to spend time on projects at a loss in order to maintain goodwill in the cycling community.”

He wryly noted the irony of such a proclamation, since Velocipede is a nonprofit: “I don’t know how to run a profitable bike shop.”

This article has been updated to correct where the store manager of Trek Federal Hill will transfer.