City To Begin Collecting Abandoned Bicycles In July
By Hadas Kuznits
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - Abandoned bicycles will be collected by the city of Philadelphia next month.
Aaron Ritz, bicycle and pedestrian programs planner for the city of Philadelphia says abandoned bicycles locked to bike poles are being tagged with a notice that on July 11th, the locks will be broken and they will become city property. So how do they determine that a bike has been abandoned?
"The bicycle is in unridable condition," Ritz says. "It's missing parts or is otherwise damaged in a way that it couldn't be ridden and it has been in the same location for a month or more. Those are kind of our criteria."
Some folks say this move will free up much needed bicycle parking.
"It'll be like three bikes on one pole and they'll hang out in the streets," says one rider.
And it will help the reputation of bicycling, says this cyclist, "The abandoned bikes, they're just really unsightly and they make everyone think that bikes are garbage."
So what happens to the abandoned bikes?
"We donate them to two different charities -- we work with Neighborhood Bike Works which runs a number of programs for youth throughout the city and then the other group that we work with is called Resources For Human Development and they do similar programs around workforce re-entry," Ritz says.
