#ghost bikes

Ghost Rider.

Ghost Bike.

Folsom @ 14th St in San Francisco, Ca

In May 2010 photographer Genea Barnes discovered Ghost Bikes while she was in New York for a shot. Their symbolic power affected her so profoundly that she began The Ghost Bike Project. She was here in 2013 at which time we saw some bikes pop up. Since then she has published a book  and Ghost Bike has spread to different cities to remember bike fatalities and promote bicycle safety. Read that article we published in 2013

There have been at least 2 other sighting in San Francisco with one at the Embarcadero by the Ferry Building.

https://www.streetartsf.com/blog/ghost-bike/

Link to the organization 

On a chilly Saturday evening in April, Kevin Daloia took a bicycle that he had painted white and locked it to a pole on East 161st Street and Melrose Avenue in the Bronx. Then he climbed up, stood on the seat of the bike and mounted a metal sign on the pole above it. “Cyclist Killed Here/Rest In Peace,” the sign said. The cyclist, Thierno Balde, was hit by a car on Feb 23 while on his way home…

Road Blog: Utah Ghost Bike

Roadside memorial for Tyler Droeger, killed in September 2021 when a driver drifted off this stretch of U.S. 89 in central Utah. Along U.S. 89 just north of Hatch, Utah. Tyler Droeger was riding a 4,000-mile circuit of the West on a fund-raising mission in late September 2021 when he was hit from behind by someone who drifted across a rumble strip and the highway shoulder where the cyclist was…

Before Gerardo’s death I did not know that hundreds of drivers purposefully run the red lights on Lake Shore Drive (U.S. Highway 41) every day. I would not have believed it if I hadn’t seen it myself. It sounded absurd to me, but then I stood out there where Gerardo had been killed. I stood on a thin oasis of concrete barely large enough to fit his ghost bike, between eight lanes of traffic, and in 10 minutes I saw an endless stream of drivers running the red lights. This is what killed Gerardo. Not only a dangerous decision by one driver, but a flawed design and complete absence of enforcement so that people feel empowered to drive dangerously. All these drivers knew that they would not be held accountable for their behavior. This was no accident. This was negligence by a driver and negligence by a city government. The police let us know they intended to take down Gerardo's ghost bike shortly after it was installed since it could be a "distraction" to drivers. Drivers with cell phones, billboards, radios, and in-car computers might be distracted by a reminder of their responsibility, and apparently that was too much to ask.

Killing a bicyclist with a car is a shortcut to punishment-free manslaughter. Whether it’s due to malice, negligence, poor infrastructure, or some combination of those and other factors it is the driver of the car who has a duty to keep vulnerable people safe, and it is their failure in that duty when someone dies. In American society we teach drivers that running over cyclists and pedestrians is a minor annoyance and not likely to to result in any consequences.