Bicycle graveyards: why do so many bikes end up underwater?......Every year, thousands of bikes are tossed into rivers, ponds, lakes and canals. What’s behind this mass drowning? 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. 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. 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?  or it is reasonable to surmise, and the numbers appear to be growing as bike-sharing schemes proliferate. 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 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 photosandvideos 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. 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......read more         https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/jul/28/bicycle-graveyards-why-do-so-many-bikes-end-up-underwater