I walked past them for years, back when I lived in DC — those all-white bicycles chained to signposts and light poles around the city, sometimes with flowers or a photo tucked into the spokes. I knew they had to be some kind of memorial. What I never knew was what to call them. Then I came across a post about one in Canberra and finally learned they're called ghost bikes. And once you know the name, you can't unsee them.
A ghost bike is a small, quiet kind of memorial. Take a bicycle, strip it down, paint the whole thing white — frame, wheels, seat, everything — and lock it up at or near the spot where a cyclist was killed by a driver. Sometimes there's a sign. Sometimes just flowers, a photo, a stuffed animal. The bike itself becomes the marker.
The practice traces back to St. Louis in October 2003. A man named Patrick Van Der Tuin watched a driver hit a cyclist in a bike lane, and in response, painted an old bike white and left it at the scene with a hand-lettered sign reading "Cyclist Struck Here." He and some friends went on to place more than a dozen additional ghost bikes around the city. Other places picked up the idea soon after — Pittsburgh in 2004, then New York, Seattle, and dozens more cities worldwide in the years since. By one count taken in 2017, more than 630 ghost bikes had appeared across over 210 locations around the globe.
The idea of a painted-white bike actually goes back even further. In 1960s Amsterdam, an anarchist collective started leaving white bicycles around the city as part of a scheme to make bikes free for anyone to grab and ride — an early bike-share experiment tangled up with protest art. The ghost bike movement borrowed the color but flipped the meaning: instead of an invitation to ride, it became a marker of a ride that ended.
I'd seen a couple around DC and figured there were probably more scattered across the city. What I didn't know were the specifics — who each one was for, and the individual history behind it. Take the one in Dupont Circle, where I used to work — I must have walked past it more times than I can count without ever knowing whose story it told. The fuller stories are worth reading on their own, so I've linked a few below.
That's really the whole intent behind them: not decoration, not even just mourning, but a visible, physical reminder planted in the exact spot where the design of a street failed somebody. A ghost bike doesn't ask you to feel sad. It asks you to notice — and maybe to ask why that intersection needed a body before anyone paid attention to it.
Now that I know what to call them, I keep thinking back to the ones I walked past without ever really looking.
Further reading: