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Why do so many bikes end up underwater?
- raydiatian 4y agoThat’s sort of like asking “why do so many people end up dead?” Because the human activity Markov chain terminates with death, or in the case of bikes with ending up at the bottom of a river out of the way of accessibility.
- bergenty 4y agoThat doesn’t make sense though, it’s much easier for me to throw away a bike in a large public trash can than find my nearest water body and go through the trouble of making sure it will sink.
- peteradio 4y agoBut you will never cross paths with a landfill right? People do continue to cross over the river again and again. Discoverability bias.
- bagacrap 4y agoI see more dumpsters than rivers
- peteradio 4y agoThe dumpster has to be completely filled to emit evidence of a disposed bicycle, that is beside the point ... Why would anyone write an expose on bicycles being disposed of in a public dumpster. The absolute numbers to give a fuck are entirety different and don't even point the same direction on the moral compass. An expose on dumpster bikes would be like why aren't people throwing more bikes away in dumpsters sounds more like a shitty Seinfeld routine. "Why aren't there more bikes in dumpsters? You never see em! Meanwhile everybody's dumping into the river! There's a dumpster right there!" It's obvious befuddled nonsense which does not admit the intentional flow of trash away from the placement and the inability of a bike to flow in a river. End of discussion have good weekend EVERYONE!
- basedgod 4y agowhat the river doesn't ask questions. doesn't judge you. doesn't rear it's ugly head of spatial conformity when your bike doesn't fit. it merely politely swallows whatever you put into it, wherever you are, leaving you free to go about your day vs the municipal trash can, where you'll be fined if it doesn't fit, and have to lug it in way more fun to toss and dump on one last wild ride of your bike bikes don't float hth
- oynqr 4y agoCan you hear the ocean? It longs for your car batteries.
- djbusby 4y agoTyres. For a reef (obviously) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_Reef https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_Reef
- reaperducer 4y agoI seem to remember that back in the 80's, IBM sunk a metric assload of hard drives off the coast of Boca Raton to make a reef. This was something that happened more than five days ago, so nothing came up when I did a Google search.
- ChoGGi 4y agohttps://www.gillware.com/hard-drive-data-recovery/hdd-burial-sea-davy-jones-locker/ https://www.gillware.com/hard-drive-data-recovery/hdd-burial...
- bombcar 4y agoThis is why public dumpsters are probably a good idea in general.
- nsxwolf 4y ago
- celticninja 4y agoSomeone will pull it out of the trash can even if it is just to free wheel part way to their destination before dumping it. Eventually someone dumps it in a body of water where it cannot be seen and if it could would be deemed unusable. It's a bit like the drunk, wall and gutter, they will bounce off the wall everytime they hit it, but once they are in the gutter they are stuck there.
- Johnny555 4y agoI've never seen a public trash can large enough to hold an entire bike, but lots of bodies of water that could hold a bike. I've only seen one bike end up in the water (a mountain bike that fell off the back of a sailboat), and it sank immediately, there was no problem making sure it sank. A commercial dumpster would hold it, but most places around here keep those locked up (either by locking the cover or keeping them behind a locked gate). Probably because they got tired of people dumping personal trash (like bicycles) in them.
- pizza234 4y agoBike are very easy to get rid of, not in trash cans (I find that unrealistic, too), but because they're appealing for their individual pieces, since they're mostly generic (as opposed to appliances, which even when sold for parts, have mostly specialized components). There is always somebody that will take them to extract parts to fix/build other bikes (assuming a large enough city, and enough bike users). I've actually purchased a bike from a shop that made bikes from parts. It was a horror, but it shows that there is a life cycle that doesn't end in a river :)
- raydiatian 4y agoIt makes perfect sense. Bikes at your large public trash can be easily recycled or discarded at municipal waste facility. Bikes lost to rivers lakes and oceans accumulate into graveyards. Thus the “why so many”
- googlryas 4y agoIt's interesting that hooligans and lowlifes trend towards similar behavior the world over, as if there is something in the human DNA driving them towards these actions.
- AdrianB1 4y agoIt is not that complicated, a few friends and relatives living in the Netherlands told me the 3 mai reasons: - you want to go somewhere and you don't have your bike. You borrow one, but when you get near the destination and you don't want to risk a theft charge, you dump it in the canal, the water is removing fingerprints and DNA - you have an old bike that does not work anymore. It is cheaper to throw it in the canal - you find a bicycle poorly parked (or dumped) on a sidewalk or some place that is inconvenient, you throw it out of the way ... in the canal There may be other reasons in other places, but these are in that part of the world where they live.
- pmontra 4y agoI understand #2 and #3 but #1? Who checks if you own the bike you are riding and why? Or borrow == steal?
- AdrianB1 4y agoIt was a polite way to say it was technically stealing. Sometimes people return these bikes, but if the destination is a bar, it includes some alcohol and in the morning you don't remember how the night started, it is a good precaution to get rid of the bike and anything linking it to you. I don't support any such behavior and the guys that I know don't do it, just reporting it.
- hiptobecubic 4y ago"technically stealing" here means "actually just regular old stealing."
- OnlyMortal 4y agoLooks at the canals in Amsterdam Theft.
- jmkb 4y agoOne reason: It's thrilling to ride a bike into the water. When I trained as a pool lifeguard, we frequently had to "rescue" bicycles that had been ridden off the high dive the night before. I imagine it's like crash-landing a plane, but with somewhat less risk of injury. (Although this would be slightly less tempting when the target is a filthy canal.)
- MonkeyMalarky 4y agoThe speed boost from riding a bike off a high dive would be awesome but do you try to stay on it for the fall or do you separate midair and try not to land on top in the water?
- jethro_tell 4y agoYes, you absolutely want to separate falling off a buck when it's on the ground hurts enough, falling from 12 feet with a bar between your legs is a bad idea. We used to tie our bikes to the end of the peer and do tricks then pull them up by the string. It's pretty fun.
- jmkb 4y agoNow that's what I call re-cycling! [U+1F92A]
- WalterBright 4y agoI wouldn't relish the thought of metal parts of the bike being rammed into me.
- bagacrap 4y agojump off mid air
- 28304283409234 4y agoAs can be seen here, on dutch national television, for decades: https://m.youtube.com/results?sp=mAEA&search_query=ter+land+ter+zee+en+in+de+lucht+beste+ https://m.youtube.com/results?sp=mAEA&search_query=ter+land+...
- Landsubsidence 4y agoSuppose you are on a bridge or near a body of water as we humans tend to gravitate. Where would you decide to go pee?
- WalterBright 4y agoThey probably went there to spawn bikelets.
- bena 4y agoBecause they don't float
- fargle 4y agothis is the correct answer.
- hnuser847 4y agoBecause it’s absolutely exhilarating to throw stuff into the water (or off cliffs, or into holes, etc). Not condoning the behavior but you gotta admit it’s pretty fun.
- cheeze 4y agoI prefer throwing things from high-up spots, but yeah I agree...
- idiotsecant 4y agoI work for a company whose product requires periodically removing trash from rivers and reservoirs. When the rent-an-e-scooter places came to my town I was absolutely sure that we would end up dredging these things out of the river by the dozens. Strangely, not many ended up in there. I haven't used one so I'm not sure how they prevent it but whatever they do is startlingly effective.
- anonred 4y agoMost scooters are decently heavy, maybe 40-50 lbs. Carrying one some distance to a river while it beeps at you probably takes enough effort to deter casual hooligans.
- bluefirebrand 4y agoThe downtown of a lot of cities has bridges over rivers that would be trivial to huck those e-scooters into. We found a car2go in the river once, apparently.
- idiotsecant 4y agoOur downtown has a pretty extensive riverfront connected to the sidewalk system, it's trivially easy to ride a scooter right up to the river, lift it over a 3 foot guard rail, and pitch it into the river!
- reaperducer 4y agoBecause it’s absolutely exhilarating to throw stuff into the water (or off cliffs, or into holes, etc). When I was in high school I worked at a supermarket, and one of the duties all the male high schoolers had was to round up the shopping carts twice per shift. The supermarket was built on landfill, and parking lot was a slope with a cliff at the end. Any shopping carts with wonky wheels were "accidentally" set free to roll downhill, slowly getting faster, until the front wheels hit the curb with such speed that the entire cart flipped over and tumbled down into the ravine. The ravine has since been filled in and turned into a movie theater. I wonder if there are hundreds of dead shopping carts entombed underneath.
- umeshunni 4y agoRead through the entire article and I see no numbers just anecdotes after anecdotes. I guess it's Friday evening and time for a 'feel good' clickbait article.
- micromacrofoot 4y agoI think it's fairly simple, and also relates to why some people will dump heavy trash into water: you can't see it once it's in there. For our dumb monkey brains it's close to magic. How many other places can make something turn invisible with nearly zero effort?
- walthamstow 4y agoA key driver in Manchester and London was the cheap Chinese sharing bikes from Ofo, around 2015-16. All the kids in my area broke the locks off and rode them around, a lot of them ended up in canals.
- blastro 4y agowhen i lived it mountain view, i watched as one of the dry river beds filled up with google campus bikes over the span of a few weeks
- lizardactivist 4y agoChavs and yobs.
- ilamont 4y agoThe late singer Mark Lanegan (Queens of Stone Age, Screaming Trees) talked about dumping bikes in the river in his memoir "Sing Backwards and Weep." He was a small town hellion who didn't give a FF about authority or other people's needs or feelings, and would steal bikes from the local community college at will. Once he got home or arrived at some other destination, he would toss the bikes in the river or nearest irrigation canal without a second thought. ETA: The memoir is brutal. He did not romanticize any aspect of being part of the '90s Seattle scene, and talks about being a strung-out junkie in a way that no other rock star ever does. He deeply regrets not being there for his friend Kurt Cobain, who reached out multiple times before he took his life in 1994. Courtney Love not only forgave him, but saved Lanegan's life when he hit rock bottom in the late 90s. It's a very powerful book. https://www.hachettebooks.com/titles/mark-lanegan/sing-backwards-and-weep/9780306922794/ https://www.hachettebooks.com/titles/mark-lanegan/sing-backw...
- jasonboyd 4y agoDamn. I didn't know he had passed. I liked him.
- hiptobecubic 4y agoI guess? Sounds like he was kind of an asshole.
- ilamont 4y agoIncredible singer and songwriter, messed-up human being. Not the first, won't be the last.
- awofford 4y agoI was in Amsterdam walking down the street one night and saw a bike just fall into a canal. No one was around except my wife and I. So at least one ended up in the water because someone poorly positioned it against the railing.
- travisgriggs 4y agoAll I could think of while reading this was about one of my favorite devin supertramp videos that features bikes and water. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tuwHs2aeF9Y https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tuwHs2aeF9Y