This month's topic is Bike Skeletons. You've seen them around Cambridge, the remains of bicycles locked up to some immovable object. The bikes are usually only frames with maybe a few twisted battered pieces still attached. This is the bicycle equivalent of cars up on blocks in the South Bronx. Or maybe it's just modern art, I know there are a fair number of rust exhibits over at MIT.
This is a common sight in Cambridge, but I just saw one in Arlington Center for the first time, and started wondering about the relative safety of bike parking out in the 'burbs.
So I'm suggesting that we compile a list based on your favorite parking places.
Estimates of amount of time for a bicycle left unattended at various spots around town to be vandalized or removed. I have my own personal estimates:
Union Square, Somerville 2 hrs
Harvard Square, Cambridge 1 hr
MIT, Cambridge, 5 minutes
This is of course highly speculative. I think we need some hard evidence to support this. So I suggest that you take your old trashmo bike, and lock it outside in your favorite parking place overnight.
You can do the accelerated test, leave the bike unlocked. This may test the limits of your timepiece, since most don't register nanoseconds.
Don't worry that your bike is already pretrashed and nothing more can be done to it. I had an old three speed that someone gave me, which had already seen better days, and was conpletely covered with rust. I used to ride the Oxide Express to a class I was taking at Harvard. This bike was such a trash heap that I stopped locking it, and sure enough, one day it was gone. Of course, I was never sure if someone stole it or if it happened to be garbage day and it got collected.
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