Every decade or so, the city of Paris drains the Canal Saint-Martin. The nearly three-mile-long waterway, which runs south across a swathe of the Right Bank, was originally constructed to keep Paris clean, supplying fresh water to a city plagued by cholera and dysentery. But for the two centuries of the canal’s existence, it has often served a different – in fact, opposite – function. It is a dumping ground, a big liquid trash can. The periodic draining is therefore also an unveiling. The water recedes, and the stuff kicked or heaved or furtively dropped into the canal over the preceding few thousand nights is revealed.
When the canal was emptied in 2016, crowds gathered on footbridges and along the quais to watch cleaning crews trudge through the mud and clear out the junk. There was lots of it. Mattresses, suitcases, street signs, traffic cones. A washer-dryer, a tailor’s mannequin, tables and chairs, baths, toilets, old radios, personal computers. A number of vehicles, none of them designed to travel on water, were pulled from the mire. There were baby strollers, shopping carts, at least one wheelchair and several mopeds.
Today, the streets abutting the canal in the 10th arrondissement are among the most fashionable in Paris, lined with chic cafes and restaurants. But late at night the area retains some of the dank atmosphere of bygone years, when it was a scruffy quartier populaire and often served as the setting for noir films and detective novels. In those pulp fiction tales, dark secrets emerge from the Canal Saint-Martin murk. The murder mystery in Georges Simenon’s Maigret and the Headless Corpse is set in motion when the police dredge up a dismembered body near the Quai de Valmy. No human remains were discovered during the 2016 cleaning, but workers did find a handgun in one of the northernmost locks. Later, officials announced that a rifle had also been found.
The most plentiful items in the canal – other than wine bottles and mobile phones – were bicycles. Nine years earlier, in 2007, Paris had launched a bike-share scheme, Vélib’, in which 14,500 rental bicycles were introduced across the city. As the waters were drawn off, the skeletal forms of dozens of Vélib’ cruisers could be seen half-buried in the sludge on the canal floor. There were scores of other bikes, too, of various makes and vintages, some of which appeared to have been maimed before being sent to their watery grave. There were bikes with bent and twisted wheels, or no wheels at all. There were bikes whose wheels and frames were intact but whose stems and handlebars were missing: headless corpses.
Some of the bikes may have ended up in the canal by accident. There are numerous scenarios that can result in the unintentional depositing of a bicycle in a body of water. Cyclists lost in the dark or disoriented by fog steer bikes off towpaths into canals. Drunk cyclists fall from bridges. Thieves fleeing police by bicycle swerve into the river. The luckier victims manage to pull themselves – and, sometimes, their bicycles – back to dry land, but these incidents can have calamitous outcomes. A scan of newspaper archives turns up grisly stories with vivid headlines: “Boy drowns in canal: found with his bicycle”, “Woman cyclist drowned: blown over parapet of river bridge”, “Rode into canal in blackout: Gloucester man drowned cycling to work”, “Cyclist drowned, but how?”. Some despondent souls have deliberately pedalled into the depths. In the fall of 2016, a 38-year-old woman left a suicide note in her apartment in DeWitt, New York, not far from Syracuse. The woman then went to a nearby state park, where she rode into a lake on a mountain bike. Her body, still attached to the bike, was found a week later.
As for the bikes in the Canal Saint-Martin: it seems safe to assume that most of them wound up in the water neither by accident nor under tragic circumstances. For those disposed to random acts of hooliganism – who, perhaps, sublimate the compulsion to do violence to sentient beings by trashing insentient stuff they happen across – a bike presents an inviting target. The growth of share schemes like Vélib’ has put more bicycles on the streets of the world’s cities, and these bikes may strike vandals as fair game, since they are not owned by individuals. The introduction of dockless hire bikes, which sit on sidewalks rather than secured in docking stations, has removed any impediment to such forms of self-expression as wheel bashing, frame mauling and brake-cable clipping. Some people take a more whimsical approach: dangling bikes from wrought-iron fences, perching them atop traffic lights and bus shelters, sticking them in high tree branches to roost like nesting pterodactyls.
Throwing a bicycle into the water is a specialised sport, which offers its own peculiar satisfactions. On social media reels, videos show pranksters rolling bikes down embankments into lakes, tipping bikes over quayside railings, tossing bikes into rushing whitewater. In one clip, a teenage boy faces the camera holding a weather-beaten blue BMX. “Mike, this is your bike,” he says. “It’s been in my garage, and I don’t really want it. So I’m gonna throw it off the jump in the pond. I hope you don’t mind.” With a running shove, the boy sends the riderless bicycle somersaulting off a wooden plank into the water. Whoops and laughter can be heard in the background as the jittery camera records the bike’s quick demise, the rear wheel bobbing briefly above the surface before vanishing into the gulping pond – a slapstick murder. I won’t lie: it looks fun.
Clearly, for many, it is fun. In some places, it’s an epidemic. An Englishman who grew up in Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, recalled that in the 1960s local boys would steal bicycles and go joyriding; the escapades would end with the ritual dumping of the bikes in the River Nene. This practice was discovered when “a boat snagged on … an underwater mountain of bicycles”.
In Amsterdam, drowned bikes were at one time heaped so high in the city’s 165 canals that they scraped the underside of flat-bottomed barges. The solution was fietsen vissen, “bicycle fishing”. In the old days, this task was accomplished by freelance scavengers who plied the canals in rowboats, using hooked poles to extract bikes, which were sold for scrap. In the 1960s, Amsterdam’s water agency assumed responsibility for bicycle fishing. These days, a corps of municipal workers trawl for drowned bikes on boats equipped with cranes attached to hydraulic claw grapples. The problem is not as severe as it once was, but fishers still pull 15,000 bicycles from the canals each year. It is a unique Amsterdam spectacle that never fails to draw a crowd of onlookers: the big metal claw rising out of the water with a dripping haul of wheels and frames and handlebar baskets. The bikes are dropped into garbage barges and transported to scrapyards for recycling. It is said that many of the recycled bikes are turned into beer cans.
In Amsterdam, as in Paris, no one is quite certain why or how so many bicycles wind up in the water. City officials ascribe the problem, vaguely, to vandalism and theft. Alcohol surely plays a role, and there could well be a kind of ecosystem at work: a bicycle is pulled from the canal and recycled into a beer can, whose contents are guzzled by an Amsterdammer, who, weaving home at the end of a dissipated night, spots a bicycle and is seized by an impulse to hurl the thing into a canal. The writer Pete Jordan, in his charming book about Amsterdam and cycling, In the City of Bikes, devotes several pages to bicycle drowning, linking it, in part, to the city’s tumultuous political history. In the 1930s, communists pranked fascists by tossing their bicycles into the Prinsengracht, the “Prince’s Canal”; during the German occupation in the second world war, resistance leaders called on Amsterdammers to dump their bicycles into canals to keep them from falling into the hands of the Nazis, who were confiscating bikes. Jordan also cites the 1963 Dutch novel Fietsen naar der maan (Cycling to the Moon), which depicts bicycle drowning as an elaborate form of theft: a bicycle fisher secretly knocks bicycles into an Amsterdam canal at night; he returns the next morning to retrieve the bikes, which he sells to a fence.
The situation in Amsterdam is perhaps best explained by simple maths. There are an estimated 2m bicycles in the city and 30 miles of canals, and logic dictates that there will be some spillover of one into the other. When an Amsterdammer needs to get rid of an old bicycle, a waterway will often provide the most convenient dumpster. The Dutch newspaper Trouw once characterised Amsterdam’s canals as “those traditional garbage cans where we take our visitors on boat trips”.
But this is not just a Dutch phenomenon. In 2014, the Tokyo parks department became aware that non-native fish had been introduced into the large pond that sits in the centre of Inokashira Park, in the city’s western suburbs. The fish, which were thought to have been put in the water by former owners, were causing environmental damage; officials decided to drain the water to remove the fish. But when the pond was emptied, another kind of invasive species was found: dozens of bicycles. The discovery took many in Tokyo by surprise. Sanitation workers had long complained about the abandoning of unwanted bikes in streets and alleys and parking lots. But the dumping of bicycles in bodies of water was a largely unknown – by definition, hidden – custom. How many more bicycles are covered by the world’s waters, concealed by ponds and lakes and canals, by the Danube, the Ganges, the Nile, the Mississippi?
A lot, it is reasonable to surmise, and the numbers appear to be growing as bike-sharing schemes proliferate. During the first year Vélib’ was in operation, Paris police officers fished dozens of bikes out of the Seine. A bike-share company stopped doing business in Rome after too many of its bicycles were thrown into the Tiber. “Dockless bikes keep ending up underwater,” reported the Boston Globe in 2018, soon after the arrival of bike-share firms in Boston and its suburbs. In February 2019, in New York, a Citi Bike cruiser that had evidently spent some time in the Hudson River appeared overnight at a docking station on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The bicycle was blistered with barnacles and molluscs; its spokes were covered in seaweed. A Hudson River conservancy expert was asked by the website Gothamist to assess the length of time the bicycle had been underwater. “Based on the oysters on the handlebar, we’d say [the Citi Bike has] been in the river since at least August, potentially since June,” the expert said.
The same problem has been reported in Melbourne, in Hong Kong, in San Diego, in Seattle, in Malmö̈, Sweden, and in many other cities. In Britain, hire bikes have been pulled from canals in London and Manchester, and from the Thames, Cam, Avon and Tyne rivers. In 2016, the Canal & River Trust, which holds the guardianship over waterways in England and Wales, released transfixing underwater video footage of fish drifting lazily along the floor of a canal, past bicycle wheels fringed with algae.
The most dramatic reports of bicycle dumping and dredging have come from China. In 2016 and 2017, the then-largest bike-sharing companies in the world, Ofo and Mobike, salvaged thousands of their dockless rental bikes from rivers in southern China. One widely circulated video showed a man on a busy pedestrian footbridge tossing Mobikes into Shanghai’s Huangpu River. Other viral clips caught such spectacles as the demolishing of share bikes by a group of children and a share bike being battered by a hammer-wielding elderly woman. Share bikes were stolen and stripped for parts, thrown under automobiles, buried in construction sites, and set on fire. The vandalism has prompted soul-searching in China. “It is common to hear people describe bike-sharing as a ‘monster-revealing mirror’ that has exposed the true nature of the Chinese people,” the New York Times reported in 2017.
Or perhaps that mirror reflects larger truths about our times. The man who was filmed throwing bicycles into the river in Shanghai was a migrant from Hong Kong who told journalists he had destroyed an additional nine Mobikes with a hammer. The man said that he was infuriated by the company’s violation of users’ privacy: “The chips in Mobikes are unsafe and disclose users’ personal information, such as their locations.”
Theoretically, a bike-sharing programme is an initiative that makes city life not only more convenient and more pleasurable but more ecological and more equitable, fairer and freer. In fact, many bike-share schemes are public-private partnerships, sponsored by multinational banks whose logos emblazon the bicycles’ mudguards. The dockless bike-share industry is dominated by tech companies that have flooded streets and sidewalks with bikes, often before regulations or infrastructure are in place. Most dockless systems are app-based and offer a familiar digital age trade-off: ease and convenience at the expense of privacy. The apps collect a rider’s personal data, and the bicycles use built-in GPS chips and wireless connections to transmit that rider’s location as frequently as every few seconds. A bicycle that spies on its rider – it’s quite a plot twist for the machine that, once upon a time, in the heady days of the late-19th-century bicycle boom, promised a previously unimaginable kind of personal freedom.
In China, more than 70 dockless bike-share startups, backed by more than $1bn in venture capital, pushed millions of bikes into cities in 2016 and 2017. Supply swamped demand, and the bikes, quite literally, piled up. On the outskirts of Beijing, Shanghai, Xiamen and other cities, tens of thousands of impounded share bikes, many of them brand new, filled vast vacant lots, towering dozens of feet above the ground in enormous agglomerations. These places have been called “bicycle graveyards”, but in overhead photos and videos captured by drone, they often looked more like fields of flowers: the bright yellow and orange and pink hues of the bike frames stretched out for acres, like a lurid carpet laid over the land. History-minded viewers of these images might think of that archetypal speculative bubble, the “tulip mania” that captivated the Dutch republic in the 17th century.
The bicycle isn’t the only form of transport that has been subject to boom-bust cycles and waves of vandalism. In recent years, the introduction of electric scooter sharing programmes to cities has brought anger from pedestrians who resent the machines cluttering pavements and motorists who regard them as unwelcome on roads. Reports have flooded in from across the globe: in Los Angeles, e-scooters have been shoved into public toilets, buried in the sand, and thrown in the ocean; in Cologne, a team of divers discovered hundreds of e-scooters lying at the bottom of the Rhine, secreting pollutants into the river from leaking battery casings. The “scooter rage” has prompted leading e-scooter companies like Bird and Lime to manufacture new models with improvements designed to thwart those who would cut brake cables, remove QR codes, and perform other acts of sabotage.
These attacks might be viewed as guerrilla assaults in a larger war: a global battle over the right to roadways that has reached a new pitch in recent years, as cities rethink their relationship to cars, install cycling-friendly infrastructure, and embrace bike share programmes and other initiatives to encourage “micromobility”. Perhaps the most noteworthy development is the advent of the e-bike – bicycles with a battery motor – whose astonishing popularity around the world suggests that a new cycling revolution – potentially the most significant since the storied 1890s bike boom – may be nigh. In China alone, there are 300m e-bikes on the roads, and the recovery of the Chinese bike-share industry after the debacle of the late 2010s has been based largely on the introduction of e-bikes to sharing fleets.
But once again, saboteurs have struck. In Peterborough, where the urchins of yore rolled stolen two-wheelers in the Nene, an e-bike rental scheme was suspended last year when vandals inflicted thousands of pounds’ worth of damage on the bikes, including an incident in which 50 bikes were harmed in a single spree. A 2021 report on the global bike-sharing industry noted that a “rise in bike vandalism & theft are expected to hinder the market growth”. In any event, the hire bike that is trashed – or torched, or chucked into a river, or heaped on a junkyard mountain – tells a story about the 21st century, though the meaning of that tale, and its denouement, are at this point far from clear. Whatever the future holds, it comes with a bicycle body count.
Of course, there have always been bicycle graveyards. If you walk down a desolate street in an industrial neighbourhood, you might happen upon a scrap-metal facility, and if you look hard enough, you will probably spot bikes and bike components, scattered amid heaps of detritus. There is a large scrapyard one block from my Brooklyn apartment. All day, huge grapple excavators hiss and snort over mounds of metal, loading and unloading barges in the adjacent Gowanus canal. The scrap is placed into balers and compressed into 220kg blocks. Sometimes I’ve caught sight of bicycle parts in those big rectangular bales – frames and wheels and other bike bits, flattened out like fossilised remains. Several years ago, the scrapyard was fined $85,000 when the New York state Department of Environmental Conservation discovered more than 100 instances of “metal spillover”, in which the company had dumped debris into the canal. Perhaps the slimy Gowanus – like the Canal Saint-Martin, like the picturesque grachten of old Amsterdam – holds hidden troves of bikes beneath its waterline.
For all I know, one of my old bicycles could be in the canal. It occurs to me that of all the bikes I’ve owned, 20 or so at least, the only one whose whereabouts I can account for is the black cruiser that at this moment is locked to a streetlamp, near my home. Naturally, I don’t know what became of my bikes that were stolen. But I also have no memory of having ever given a bike away, or of selling a bike; nor can I recall throwing a bike into a dumpster. I’m sure I must have left a bike or two behind in a basement when I’ve moved house.
As for the rest: beats me. Where do bicycles go when they die? A bicycle is a durable good, but it’s also a disposable one: it’s an easy thing to get rid of, if you don’t mind being a little antisocial about it. In the affluent developed world, at least, a bike can be bought cheap, and when it breaks down, or when a new bike is bought, an owner will often expel the old one – leave it somewhere outdoors to be claimed by a passerby or scooped up by the waste removal department.
Then there are those bicycles that are ditched in lonelier locations, where they lie around in increasingly abject states as time and the elements take their toll. In cities, you often see bikes that are abandoned but locked up, fastened with old chains or U-locks to poles and fences. Usually, vultures swoop in to pick at the carcasses, making off with whatever they can – a wheel, or two wheels, or a set of handlebars. These pillaged bikes can be sad sights to behold. Chains droop from battered chainrings, smashed reflectors litter the ground, spokes and brake cables splay out like the haywire hairdos in George Booth cartoons. I think of the great Tom Waits song Broken Bicycles: “Broken bicycles / old busted chains / with rusted handlebars / out in the rain … / laid down like skeletons / out on the lawn.” The lyrics are metaphorical – it’s a song about ruined romance – but it works as reportage. If those broken bicycles on the lawn are like most bikes, they are made largely of either steel or aluminium alloy, which means they originated underground, as ore or sedimentary rock that was pulled from a mine. Now little bits of the bikes are returning to the earth: the flakes of rusted steel and the fine chalky particles that coat the surface of oxidised aluminium may be scattered by the wind and washed down the sewer in a rainstorm.
Some derelict bikes get a second life. The scrapyard down the street from my home ships its metal bales off to recycling facilities. There, the scrap is cleaned and sorted, placed in furnaces and heated to a molten state, and submitted to purification processes. Eventually, the metals are cast or rolled into sheets and put back in circulation. Steel and aluminium are among the most widely recycled materials on earth. Sometimes, as in Amsterdam, a scrapped bicycle frame may be reborn as a beverage can, or as food packaging of another sort. Recycled steel and aluminium are used in the construction of street furniture and houses and apartment buildings. They are also used in the building of aeroplanes and automobiles and, indeed, bicycles.
The mystic in me likes to imagine a cityscape formed from old bicycles: cyclists riding bikes reincarnated from earlier bikes, pedalling past skyscrapers supported by girders and beams and rebar made of recycled bike frames, while jet planes patched together from scrapped bicycles soar overhead. Metal recycling produces environmentally damaging waste, but some byproducts can be recycled and put to use. The dross or slag that results from aluminium casting is sometimes utilised as a filler in asphalt and concrete mixtures. In certain places, therefore, the road itself is a sort of bicycle graveyard, and cyclists out for Sunday rides are rolling their wheels across a landscape of reconstituted bones.
This article was amended on 24 August 2022 to take into account guidelines on the reporting of suicide.
Adapted from Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle, published by The Bodley Head on 4 August. Order a copy from Guardianbookshop.com