Link: Ghost bikes

[sonia]

I Build Ghost Bikes. Here’s What It’s Taught Me About Who Dies on a Bike by Jessie Singer. Beautiful photos, beautiful writing, heartbreaking.

The more ghost bikes I built, the more I found even broader lessons. Across boroughs, for example, ghost bikes were needed at intersections and on streets without bike lanes, because those places were where most were killed. In this way, the ghost bikes mapped what needed to be done: Fix a street. Build a bike lane. Protect an intersection. Each death was a lesson, and by marking the dead, the lessons appeared stark.

But there were other patterns too, ones that a ghost bike offered nothing for. These emerged only after years of building ghost bikes, as I met the families of the dead. The people we built ghost bikes for were disproportionately Black, Latino, and Asian. Often they were immigrants; often they were killed on the job, or riding to and from work in the dim of late night and early morning.

Comments

[watersword]

Holy shit that article is amazing.

[sonia]

Thanks for letting me know it touched you!

[silveradept]

It's both interesting and disheartening to see how easily poking at one part of how society fails shows a giant tangle of interweaved failures that affect it and that it affects in turn.

[sonia]

Yeah. There's that, and also, we can do one tiny thing, and the effects can ripple out, like building ghost bikes to honor the dead.