brendan halpin

I’m a bike commuter, and I think ghost bikes are counterproductive.

Most of you will probably not know what a ghost bike is, so here goes: when someone is killed on their bike, bike advocates will often paint a bike white and lock it to something at the scene of the crash to memorialize the dead and to draw attention to the shortage of good bike infrastructure.

Most people, as I said, have no idea what ghost bikes are about, so if the intent is to make a statement to the wider community, I don’t think it’s succeeding. But also—I don’t think the presence of a ghost bike helps change the behavior of car drivers. In the unlikely event that they know what it means, they’ll doubtless think the bike had it coming because that’s how it’s always reported when people in cars kill people on bikes.

But of course we don’t have ghost people at the site of pedestrian fatalities (at least not ones we can see) nor ghost cars where fatal car crashes have happened. So the presence of ghost bikes gives the impression that biking is a uniquely dangerous mode of transportation. This, of course, isn’t true, but also it discourages people from biking, and the more people who bike, the safer it is to bike.

So, yeah, like I said. Counterproductive.

Also? Waste of a good bike.