Breeze is credited with designing and building the first all-new mountain bikes, which riders colloquially called Breezers.

[9] In the early 2000s he devoted his Breezer brand entirely to transportation, introducing in 2002 a line of bikes for everyday use, equipping them for local trips, errands in town and commuting.

[16] In 1974 Joe Breeze took a course in the art of bicycle framebuilding from Albert Eisentraut[17] in Oakland, California, and began to build his own custom-tailored road racing frames, using his father's machine shop at their home in Mill Valley.

Vendetti had a few years earlier ridden similar 1930s-40s “paper boy” bikes on Tamalpais at the periphery of the mountain's seminal group of off-road riders, the Larkspur Canyon Gang.

Encouraged by Vendetti, Breeze bought the old fat-tire bike for $5, stripped off its extraneous parts and rode it down Mount Tamalpais.

They and other teammates including Gary Fisher, and other enthusiasts from Marin located old fat-tire “ballooner” bikes of many makes, used them off-road and settled on Schwinns built between 1937 and 1944 as the best.

They would remove extraneous parts from the bikes, strip them down to their original paint and ride them on Marin's rugged fire roads and trails.

A downhill time trial on fire roads in the hills west of Fairfax, California, Repack brought together riders from around Mount Tamalpais who stripped down older bikes for off-road use and fitted rugged parts to them.

[29][30][31] The first ten Breezer mountain bikes can be recognized by their twin lateral tubes, which Breeze included to stiffen the long frames for high-speed tracking.

[33] Ritchey became the frame supplier to the Marin County company MountainBikes, founded in 1979 by Gary Fisher and Charlie Kelly.

[36] Twenty-two of the Repack races, downhill time trials organized and promoted by Charlie Kelly, were held from 1976 to 1979.

The last Repack race in 1979 was filmed by a TV crew for a San Francisco Bay Area news program, KPIX Evening Magazine.

[41] [42] [43] Crested Butte became an important destination for mountain biking; the Pearl Pass Tour, founded in 1976, is the sport's longest running annual two-day event.

Mountain bike models included the Breezer Lightning, Jet Stream, Thunder, Storm, Beamer, Twister, and Tornado.

Transportation cycling, he said, addresses many issues at once: obesity, oil dependence, traffic congestion, global warming, lack of time for exercise.

[63] [64] Through the latter half of the 1990s, Breeze had been urging the U.S. bicycle industry to start producing bikes that non-athletes could use to get places in daily life.

[58] [65] In 2001, still seeing a need in the United States for bikes fully equipped for errands and commutes, Breeze devoted his own Breezer brand to transportation.

Breezer #2 (1978), which Joe Breeze built for MountainBikes co-founder Charlie Kelly, is on display at the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame, part of the Marin Museum of Bicycling in Fairfax, California.

[89] Joe Breeze, Otis Guy, Marc Vendetti and others are co-founders of the Marin Museum of Bicycling in Fairfax, California, which opened to the public in June 2015.

[90] Joe Breeze is Curator of the museum, which displays bicycles from the late 1860s to the present and functions as a cycling cultural center.