Sunday 17 January 2010

The Ghost Bikes of Bristol

The snow may have forced those pedestrians into our way, but it has at least shown up the harsh truth about all those cycle parks put in: the bikes there don't move.

Cotham Hill: bikes under snow

Clifton Down Shopping centre: all but one bike covered in a layer of snow

Whiteladies road: the wheel of whiteness

This shows how demand for bicycle parking is manufactured. Those cycle activists are secretly abandoning bikes all round the city, to create the illusion of popularity. We offered to tell the BBC this in a program to be broadcast on BBC1 at 19:30 on monday, but they turned us down.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Seeing the photo of a forlorn wheel by itself covered in snow reminds me of something I have meaning to do for a while: put up a collection of photographs of bicycles around Bristol that are no longer usable.

There are those, like this one outside Clifton Down, with just a wheel remaining. Others with just the frame, others with a frame but only one wheel.

Some are left for so long that only a ghostly shell remains, a simple reminder that a lump of metal was once a much-loved bicycle.

Probably for the best anyhow, keeping those subversive two-wheeled hoodlums off the streets of Bristol.