Terry Jones

Walking on the UCSD campus in 1998, I passed a bike rack that looked partly like a scrap metal junkyard. There were bikes in many conditions, from perfect to clearly abandoned rusting frames. Some had no wheels or no seat. Several were just a frame and a chain locked to the bike rack with a big expensive U-lock.

I thought “interesting, I wonder how they deal with these old bikes, possibly abandoned or forgotten bikes, abandoned frames, wheeless bikes, bikes whose owners died, etc. How can they know when it’s ok to cut something free and take it away? How can they know when it’s not ok?”

I saw the same problem at my apartment building, a similar tangle of 6 or 8 old bikes. Later, living in NYC down in the village I’d see hundreds of apparently abandoned eyesores. Blots on the fair face of the city.

So there’s the problem.

That is, devise a method or a policy for dealing with the removal of these bikes, ex-bikes, partial bikes, etc. Below are some requirements for a good solution. If you miss on any one of these, whatever you’re thinking of probably isn’t as good as what I thought of :-) There are many partial solutions.

1. It must be cheap. You must be able to employ regular people to carry out your plan. No high tech, no massive salaries, none of that.
2. It must be effective: no abandoned or unused bike will be missed.
3. There must be no waste.
4. Bike owners must get fair warning their bike is going to be taken away.
5. No one should be able to cause anyone else’s bike to be taken away.
6. No one should be able to cause a bike that should have been taken away not to be taken away.
7. No one should be able to make a bike be taken away without the owner getting a fair chance to know it was due to be taken. E.g., with parking tickets I can simply take the parking ticket off any car I like and chuck it in the trash.
8. There should not be (as far as possible) opportunities to exploit the system by criminals.
9. You must not interfere with any bicycle (no marking them, etc).
10. The program must be something that has a high probability of being regarded as fair and which gets good press (everyone loves it, business comes to you).

Those are all the conditions I can think of right now, but there may be more.

You get to make all the decisions. Pretend you’re the mayor of NYC, coming up with a new policy for cleaning up the streets. And it’s an election year.

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