It’s been there for quite a while. An old bicycle spray painted entirely white (tires, pedals and all) and chained to a post. I googled “white bicycle” and found this.
Oh wow, that’s kind of neat. Wish I had an old motorcycle to spare to paint white and put in front of my apartment complex.
Yep. There’s one at the corner of two main streets by my house where a woman was killed by someone turning right on red while she was crossing the street with her bike.
We had our first in Belfast a few months ago. Someone found it within themselves to lift it, but it was replaced again pretty quickly.
Before they built the interstate-style 4-lane highway from Sturgeon Bay to Green Bay, Wisconsin, the 2-lane highway had a few dozen small, white crosses with names near the roadside at scattered locations. The story I heard was some concerned citizen erected one each time near the accident site each time there was a fatality. I’ve also heard this practice isn’t unusual on a national scale.
We have a LOT of those crosses around here. A pretty high ratio, considering the entire valley has maybe 20,000 people officially living here.
Whoops…need to edit. There are apparantly over 150,000 people officially living in this county. I never would have guessed, seriously.
This is news to you? Sorry, not being snarky, but I just assumed people knew what these were for.
Crosses, yes. Bikes? Not so much. I’ve lived a few places in the US, including a lot of time in Oregon, a heavily bike-oriented area. Never saw one of these bikes, or never noticed them for what they were, anyway.
We have these about every ten feet in Florida but i haven’t seen any bikes yet.
some governments are taking down these cross memorials if they aren’t on private property. drivers tend to get into accidents looking at them.
Yep. The bike by my house has been there for at least a couple months and I had no idea that it was a memorial. I figured it was a “statement” of some type because of the way the entire bike was painted white. It took me a while to remember to google it.
The roadside crosses at the scene of fatal accidents are quite common around here, I never connected the two.
Or both: “Christ on a Bicycle Struck Here.”
Probably for target practice. :mad:
Hmmm, something a failed campaign, then. Not that I thought they would do much.
Every May there’s a related ride. very eerie being on a ride w/ lots of other people & not saying a word, but that’s kinda the point.
There are crosses all along the highway near me, but yesterday I saw one of these bikes off the road with a cross. Don’t know what a bicyclist would be doing on the highway, but the combination of the cross and white bike seemed a clear statement to me.
Yep. Around here (Washington DC) it’s not unheard-of for the decedent’s family to put something like that up. When we visited Montana 25+ years ago, it was apparently a state-sponsored thing to put up a plain white cross wherever there’d been a fatality. Rather sobering to go around one curve on a US highway (2, I think, on the way to Kalispell / Glacier) and see 17 or so crosses on that one short curve.
Never seen one, never heard of them until this thread. Of course, I live in an region where bicycle riding is rare in part due to the danger. If many people rode them, there’d be white bicycles on every block.
Holy smokes, yes, I see one on the way home from work but had no idea what it was for. It’s about 30 feet from the road in a clearing of a field and that road is a popular route for training cyclists. It was yellow for a while, then powder blue but always curious. I thought someone was just being quirky and eclectic but a memorial makes much more sense. Thanks, River Hippie, for solving the mystery.
The crosses always make me wonder if Jews, Muslims and atheists are better drivers than Christians.