For Once, Don't Listen To The Talking Heads!

Six years ago, Paris drained its Canal Saint-Martin to clean it, as the city does every fifteen years or so. Although the canal now bisects fashionable streets with chic cafes and shops, it was once bisected a rather gritty working-class area.  But, perhaps to no-one's surprise, the most commonly-found objects found in every canal-draining were wine bottles.

And the second-most common?  Bicycles.  The only difference is that in the most recent cleaning, many of the bikes came from Velib, the City of Light's share program.

Bicycle uncovered during most recent draining of the Canal Saint-Martin.  Photo by Yoan Valat for EPA.

The company that ran Rome's bike-share program abruptly ended its contract because so many of the bikes ended up in the Tiber.  Not exactly what Remus and Romulus had in mind, is it?

Amsterdam has had to resort to "fietsen vissen"--bicycle fishing--because bikes were piled so high in the city's canals that they scraped the flat-bottomed boats.  At one time, freelance scavengers picked them up on poles and sold them for scrap.  In the 1960's, the city's water agency assumed responsibility for the "harvest."  Now a corps of municipal workers trawl for the submerged bikes on boats equipped with cranes attached to hydraulic claw grapples.  The bikes are hauled  to scrapyards for recycling where, according to urban legend, they become beer cans. (Think about that the next time you grab a Heineken or Amstel!)

The phenomenon of bikes "sleeping with the fishes" (I grew up in a Mafia neighborhood. Gotta problem widdat?)  isn't limited to European cities.  In Tokyo, officials decided to drain a large pond in the middle of Inokashira Park to rid it of a non-native species of fish that was causing environmental damage. Their work uncovered another species that wasn't native to the pond:  bicycles.  And, in February 2019, a Citibike appeared--covered with barnacles and blisters--appeared overnight in an Upper West Side docking station. A Hudson River conservancy group expert estimated that evidence--including "oysters on the handlebars" (Upper West Siders pay good money for such things!)--indicated that the machine met its fate in the Hudson the pervious August, or possibly June.

Jody Rosen has just written an article on this phenomenon for the Guardian. It speculates on some of the reasons why so many bikes end up in waterways.  Some are dumped when by fleeing criminals--who are as likely as not to have stolen the bike they're drowning.  Others are tossed or accidentally ridden into the water by drunken revelers.  (Could recycling be contributing, if unintentionally, to bikes ending up in Amsterdam's canals?)  And there are a few instances of folks who "ended it all" by riding into murky waters, as one woman did after handcuffing herself to her machine.

But, as Rosen points out, a bicycle--especially one whose owner is unknown or a corporate entity--is an easy target for people taking out their frustrations.  I suspect that at least a few share bikes were tossed into canals, rivers, lakes and other bodies of water by folks--more than likely, young--who feel lost, alienated, abandoned or simply ignored by their societies, cultures or institutions that control their lives, and over which they feel they have no control.

As a lifelong cyclist, I cannot imagine myself tossing a bike that did nothing wrong to me into the water.  And, as an environmentally-conscious person, I cannot condone throwing anything into a body of water that its native species can't eat.  But, as we've seen, these days, where there are bikes, there are e-bikes.  That, unfortunately, includes waterways, where e-bikes and mopeds are even more of a hazard because of the rare metals and chemicals used in batteries and other components.  

So, if you have a bike, e-bike, moped or scooter you want to get rid of, sell it or donate it. But please don't follow the advice of a Talking Heads song!

Fishers Of Bicycles

If you grew up in Brooklyn during the 1960s and early 1970s, as I did, you heard stories about the Gowanus Canal.  One such tale held that it was the Mafia's necropolis:  Under the cover of night, hitmen hauled bodies from car trunks and tossed them into the turbid water.  The sheer number of such corpses, according to the legend, accounted for the foul smell that wafted from water as lifeless as the bodies submerged in it. 

A variation on this urban myth said that one reason why the "mob" chose the canal as its graveyard is that the chemicals in the water dissolved those bodies, effectively making their benighted owners disappear from the face of the earth.

While I must admit that I don't find such stories wholly implausible, I must also add this bit of historical fact:  Mesopotamians built the earliest known canals about 6000 years ago, while modern sewer systems have a history of not much more than a century.  Thus, almost any body of water could turn into a dump for everything from agricultural offal to industrial waste.  Really, just about anything that any person or company wanted to dispose could end up in a river, lake, ocean or canal.  

Yes, anything--including a bicycle.  A onetime riding buddy confessed that a bike he no longer wanted and couldn't sell "ended up" at the bottom of Jamaica Bay.  I have no doubt that thieves similarly disposed of bicycles they couldn't fence or simply didn't know what else to do with.  And I'm sure that more than a few people have tossed bikes into the nearest stream along with household trash.

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Apparently, the latter fate seems to befall two-wheelers in Amsterdam.  So many bikes piled up in Amsterdam's canals that, by the 1960's, they were scraping the bottoms of boats, according to Diane Kleinhout.  She is a spokesperson for Waternet, an agency in charge of keeping the canals clean.  In the agency's attempt to clear out bikes--as well as scooters, wheelchairs, shopping carts and other wheeled items--Waternet employs bike fishermen.

Yes, you read that right.   The job of Richard Matser and Jan de Jonge is to use a huge hydraulic claw to trawl the canal's waters and base for the old bikes and other debris.  Their job has been compared to sticking your hand into a sink full of sudsy water and groping around blindly, with your fingers, until find a spoon or whatever you were looking for.  When the "fishermen" find a bike, they pull it out of the water and load it into a barge behind the claw.  Eventually, the bikes and whatever else the "fishermen" pull up will go to a recycler.

De Jonge says they "catch" about 15,000 bicycles a year.  Given that there are about two million bicycles in Amsterdam, that is a small percentage. Still, no one knows why that many bikes end up in the city's waterways. Some are attributed to thieves.  Ironically, in a city where, it seems, everybody rides bikes, two-wheelers don't get the same reverential treatment that American bike enthusiasts lavish on them.    Utility bikes can be bought for very little money; repairing them can cost more, so--according to one theory--people simply chuck them.