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Story: Memorial to honor bicyclist hit by car ordered to be removed by City of Durham | abc11.com

Please drop the Durham City Council a message if you feel compelled to do so. I did.

or email directly: council@durhamnc.gov

02Giant 

I agree with the City, all such memorials should be removed after a specific time frame, if they are even allowed to begin with.

kickstart

I agree, most often memorials are left attended to become nothing more than a pile of debris. The only equitable and non judgmental way to address that is to limit how long they may be left in place.

howsteepisit

I also agree with the city, but I would also like so see those little crosses the signify traffic fatalities removed after some period. I think that these memorials tend to make the victims out to be some kind of hero rather than victims of accidents.

Added: I really doubt the City Government of Durham NC cares what I think as I have not visited NC for some 30 years, and currently live on the west coast. Nor do I consider issues of local governance in NC any of my concern.

Chris516

I don't agree with the city. While they do have the 45-day limit. They are actually going on a complaint in this situation. Not the 45-day limit. Also, This complaint is petty. Instead of the city getting all bent out of shape over a ghost bike. How about they worry about things like the homeless, those on Food Stamps, the education budget they have from the state, and the budget for the City of Durham Police Department. A ghost bike is not a criminal matter. But someone with a thorn in their butt. Just doesn't like a ghost bike.

I even sent them the link to the story about the topless women. To illustrate, that there are far more important things to get bent out of shape about.

JoeyBike

Just imagine what the place would look like with "ghost cars" placed everywhere there was a motor vehicle fatality during the past few months.

Take your memorials to the cemetery, erect a shrine at home, make a scrap book of the deceased, but leave PUBLIC spaces alone with any/all of your remembrances/junk. Please. The vast majority of us do not care to see it.

stevenw00d

I tend to agree w/ Durham as well. If these people want to do this on private land, or a billboard, then they certainly can. I don't think people should be able to put up any kind of memorial, advertisement, statement, etc. on any piece of public land they want to. Although I don't have a problem w/ these memorials, it is really hard to draw the line, if you bend the rules for something like this.

kickstart

Well that's the problem with using public property for personal use, the public has the right to voice an opinion and call for action. Then its up to our representatives to find a solution that takes all opinions into consideration.

79pmooney

That might make us a little more aware of the cost of the "freedom" offered by our automobiles.

Ben

79pmooney

Given how much public land and right of ways have been usurped by the automobile (roads were originally built for public use, not one specific vehicle and shared by pedestrians, horses, farm animals, wagons, etc.), I have trouble getting very upset about dedicating very small amounts of public land to a reminder on one of the costs of that takeover.

Ben

El Cid

This is a common complaint --that the road is a shared resource that should not be given over to cars. But giving most of the road to cars is commensurate with the way most people get around. It is arguably quite democratic this way.

FBinNY 

I'm basically with the city. I think it would be appropriate to allow makeshift memorials to victims to be put up for a while, and cut the victim's friends, family and well wishers some slack in their time of bereavement. But after some reasonable time (2 years is more than generous) it's time for these to be taken down.

I don't think this should be based on complaints but rather, simply on time, say a year from the event, with 30 days notice after that.

I understand the free speech thinking, but free speech doesn't mean free speech on public or private property.

So, now that it's been 2 years, it's time for this to go. But in all fairness the city should scan for all such memorials, and remove all more than a given age, without depending on complaints. The complaint mechanism is too open to selective enforcement to be used for making decisions. The ONLY issue that should be considered is that of property management, not who is saying what and who's unhappy about it.

B. Carfree

I see quite a few more memorials to people killed by drunk drivers along the roadside than I see ghost bikes and such. Most of these are set up in that gray zone where it's not quite clear if it is in the public right of way or on the adjacent private property, so they get left alone for years. Maybe the folks memorializing cycling deaths should work with the adjacent property owners and come up with something that works for them.

B. Carfree

The road on which a traffic fatality occurs should be closed for a few months, at least according to my spouse. She figures that will cause people to recalibrate the relative importance of those few seconds saved by driving carelessly. I think I like the ghost car idea better, as long as we put it in the lane where the wreck occurred.

GamblerGORD53

Here they have a 1 year limit. The bike club advocates have no quarrel with that.
Also the city puts up ghost coffin signs at all fatality sites, same 1 year limit.

CliffordK

Perhaps the municipalities need to build a single "official" memorial to the innocent people that are killed by reckless or intoxicated drivers.

FBinNY 

Why stop there? What about people killed by criminals, people killed in spousal disputes, shot by cops? In fact why don't we build memorials to every category of "victim".

Or we can get real and accept that memorials of this kind belong in cemeteries where we've been putting them for eons. Then we can go back to public memorials of heroes instead. Memorials should celebrate life and achievement, not victimhood and means of death.

There's a place for these public memorials in the short term, but then they should be quietly removed.

CliffordK

Likewise, I could argue that we shouldn't be celebrating fighting among people and nations to the point of building huge monuments.

kickstart

A few responses to this thread demonstrate that the self righteous cyclist persona is a symptom of the socially disenfranchised who just want to spread discontent.
I guess some people simply can't accept they're just another flawed face in the crowd.

Chris516

Durham | ghost bikes

KD5NRH

Around here, probably the best known of the roadside crosses is a pair of them, for a young mother and her child, placed directly across the highway from the side road where another driver pulled out in front of them on the 65mph highway. It's a bad spot, since the side road rises up to the highway, (along with tall grass and a sign for the housing development down that road, so drivers on the highway see what looks like a private driveway but can't really see if there's a car approaching on it) and there were a lot of bad wrecks there, but their crosses have been well maintained and kept very visible, which seems to have had a huge effect on the people using that side road, including keeping the incident fresh in people's minds until the housing development moved their sign back and the county keeping the grass maintained.

At least in that case, the memorials probably are saving lives. I know the landowner whose fence they're just in front of saw the aftermath of the wreck close up, and has offered to move them just inside the fence if there's ever a danger of them being removed.

rydabent

I DO NOT agree with the city. As long and family and friends keep the memorial neat and attended to, it should stay. Taking the memorial down just because one mal-content complained is not right.

Chris516

Very well put.

OldTryGuy

IMO, these memorials belong on private property.....period.

Matariki

In this particular case, the issue is that Durham recently passed an ordinance that requires memorials to be removed within a short period of the City receiving a complaint from a citizen. This particular ordinance was a hurry-up sideways approach to remove a memorial set up in the parking lot of the Police Dept for a teenager who committed suicide while in custody. Nevertheless it applies to ghost bikes and other types regardless of how they are maintained. What it means is that any single person, for any reason, can request removal and the City has to comply. There is no appeal process and also no validation that the complainer is really a citizen. There is a movement to force the City Council to revisit the policy to allow a more reasonable handling of the ordinance. Visit the petition site for more info.