Missing Citi Bike Found Covered in Barnacles
After apparently spending months underwater, the bike somehow reappeared at a Manhattan docking station.
- A missing Citi Bike mysteriously reappeared in Manhattan on Saturday.
- Filmmaker Ted Geoghegan found the bikecovered in silt and barnacles, as if it had been left underwater.
- The bike had been missing since September 2017.
When filmmaker Ted Geoghegan set out for the Citi Bike station near his Manhattan home on Saturday, he expected to find at least one working bicycle he could ride that afternoon. What he saw was a little weirder: One of the program’s signature blue bikes had been covered in silt and barnacles, as if it had just been dredged from the bottom of the Hudson
Geoghegan, known for his horror films like We Are Still Here and Mohawk, tweeted about the disappointment, noting that the bike appeared to have “been fished out of the river.” The pictures make it look like something from one of his movie
According to a Citi Bike spokesperson, the bike was last rented in September 2017, so it could have been parked underwater for up to 15 months. How it finally resurfaced is a mystery, because it likely wasn’t a Citi Bike employee who re-docked it.
“Citi Bike staff removes any bike that is in a visibly unrideable or dangerous condition,” the spokesperson said, adding that the barnacle bike “has since been removed from service by our team.”
Maybe whoever dumped the bike felt guilty and dove down months later to retrieve it themselves. Perhaps Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy got tired of fighting over bike share and ditched it for the invisible boatmobile. More likely, though, is that someone fishing or boating discovered the bike by accident and, rusty and disgusting as it was, quietly returned it to a docking station.
Jordan Miller, lead mechanic and co-owner of the Tampa, Florida, bike shop Velo Champ, often participates in river cleanup efforts in his city. He said volunteers occasionally pull up bicycles submerged in the brackish river water, and that the discarded rigs are almost always beyond repair
No comments:
Post a Comment