BIKEPGH MESSAGE BOARD ARCHIVE

There is another one in basically the same condition, locked not that far from Kraynick's, across the other side of Penn Avenue. I always see it there on my way to the shop and think "There but for the grace of God go I..."

there's a post on copenhagenize about abandoned bicycles that i think about everytime i see one. it really made me feel not so upset when i'd see stripped bikes around. whether it holds true here, i don't know, but still an interesting way to think about it

But I've always said that one of the surest signs that you have a healthy and thriving and mainstream bicycle culture is that you have abandoned bikes around.

http://www.copenhagenize.com/2009/12/disposable-recylable-bicycles.html

I would agree thriving and mainstream, but not healthy. Personally, I would prefer thriving and healthy and not mainstream. just saying.

Yeah, in the same sense that having abandoned cars lying around indicates a healthy culture.

Maybe a better question is, how did they get there? Anyone want to fess up on some past used-to-be-mine-but-I-ended-up-just-leaving-it-there set of wheels, and how it ended up coming to be that way?

cars aren't a good analogy. they are more expensive, you need to register, get plates, and insure them, so it's really easy to locate the owner, and there's a system for getting rid of abandoned cars.

not to mention they take up a lot of space and people can set them on fire or live in them

I confess. I abandoned a nice bike.

Someone gave me a very nice bike once. Two weeks later, I took it to Schenley park pool, the night before I was leaving town for a few weeks. Dropped the key somewhere in the pool area and never found it. Didn't have a spare.

When I got back it was stripped. A while later the frame disappeared.

Mick

I had a bike in college that I wound up abandoning... kind of. I rode the hell out of it for four years and at the time I thought it was pretty much unredeemable. Knowing what I do now, I would have just taken it to Kraynick's for a few sessions, but then I thought it was done for. Anyway, I left it in the basement of our dorm after graduation. Students were allowed to store things in the basement over the summer, and then like the second weekend of the school year they had an "auction" where any unclaimed items would be up for grabs, for the highest bidder. So rather than trying to sell it (I figured it was basically worthless), I just left it there.

It was kind of dumb in retrospect, but I had other stuff to do and certainly didn't have space to bring it back home.

I'm more of a rescuer. I am to bikes like some people are to lost puppies. One of my favorite bikes ever was an old Hercules 3 spd that I rescued from under an apartment fire escape. I fixed it up and it bacame sort of a public bike on the CMU campus, friends would use it and leave it unlocked around campus, people would tell me where they saw it. One Saturday I left it on the Pitt campus when there was a game and apparently some drunk football douchebags (before Heinz field) kicked the wheels into pringles. So I rebuilt wheels. Long time ago.