I never quite understood why so many people would abandon perfectly good bicycles, locked up so no one can steal them while they're abandoned. Can anybody explain this phenomenon, and why someone would do something so silly?

Even if you can't explain it, what's the standard procedure to free up the space?...Contact the local police?

My school would remove them after each semester. My work will remove them if there is a complaint. Talk to the pd and see if you can't document it and then get it removed...who knows they might give it to you.

There's an otherwise perfectly good *-Mart pink ladies' cruiser that's locked up on a nearby street corner. At a glance, the only thing wrong with it is a flat front tire. It's been there for at least two or three weeks -- which is unusual in this neighborhood, because bikes get ridden pretty often.

I've got half a mind to take a spare tube and fix it, but I wonder if the owner will ever look at it again and see that it's fixed.

This is something I have wondered about myself. In Toronto, if they are locked to a bike post owned by the city, they will come and put a note on it to remove the bike or it will be cut off. Even in my building there is a bike locker with bikes that look like they haven't been ridden in years by looking at the dust, dirt and grime that has accumulated. I suspect that at least half are from ex tenants who never came back for their bikes.

I see the same thing all over downtown Austin. Some are pretty nice bikes. I ride past one everyday that's an old steel Giant. It's appears to be in really nice condition save for the fact the saddle was stolen 2 months ago. Most times they just slowly disintegrate until only the frame remains, and then that gets bent up by the passing miscreants. One day it finally disappears. Really sad... I don't get it.

I had a former co-worker (one of the laziest people I've ever had the displeasure of working with) who rode in on a bright yellow, Mike's Hard Lemonade branded double-boinger one day, locked it up in my parking spot (not really mine, but I did lock to that signpost every day), then never touched the bike again. He spent the entire day complaining about how sore his butt was and walked home after his shift.

His work/bike averse ass was fired in August, but the bike stayed locked up out front of the cafe until November, when I removed the seatpost and rear brake cable (which is all that the idiot had strung his lock through) so that another co-worker could adopt it as his bar bike. I think the U-lock stayed locked to that post until the following summer.

My town has an abandon bike auction every few weeks so they much cut bikes out that have been left for a while. I have never attended the auction, but I have heard everything from its a great place to get cheap bikes and that it has overpriced stuff and junk. My guess is that its crawling with flippers and it might not be worth going anymore anyway.

My college picked up all the abandoned bike at eh end of the semester when the need to move bike racks around or paint them. The just put them in their metal pile to recycle, but I have snagged a few of them and fixed them up sometimes for students that needed something to ride.

I see this phenomenon at my school all the time. With college kids they bring it to school, ride it around a few times and leave them locked (with simple cable locks) everywhere.

If they leave them locked to benches, trees, gates or whatever they usually have until the end of the semester to remove them. Maintenance will put stickers stating to remove them by a certain date or they will be confiscated. Unfortunately it seems to be hit or miss if they actually will.

However, if students lock their bikes to bike racks they can be there indefinitely. We have a covered rack with 22 spots. Unfortunately 11 are taken by bikes that have not moved. They have flat tires, rusted chains, and missing parts, but remain there.

With some college kids they don't appreciate much because its not their money that was spent.

I see a few abandoned bikes on racks around town. I suppose people rode them in back in early December, the snow started up, and they just couldn't face riding in it again.
Last year I was waiting for a train in front of city hall in Calgary when a fellow tried to board with a bike. The driver came over the intercom to tell him it was rush hour and he'd have to wait until after 6:00 p.m.. He swore, hurled the bike off to the side of the platform and stomped onto the train without it. It was a piece of junk of course - most abandoned bikes are - but I could have ridden off with a free bike if I wanted.

I started grad school with my old huffy rigid mountain bike that I got when I was 13. I learned about there being nice local mountain bike trails and got a Kona mountain bike, then another. The bike rack on my car at the time only held two bikes so I left the huffy behind locked to the dorm rack with a U-lock and a cable lock. I figured I'd be back in a couple of months to pick it up. 9 years later, and I still never made it back I doubt it is still there, but it would be funny to see it still locked up. I still have the keys to the locks...hell I don't even want the bike back but the locks weren't bad.

State College Pa has time limits on all the public racks. 24 or 48 hours or something like that. Penn State collects abandoned bikes once a year, in June. They hold them for a year and auction them in spring

I went to the PSU bike auction "preview" this spring hoping to get a decent bike for a "little bit of nothing" and fix it up. they had something like 120 bikes, and 98% of them were X-mart junk bikes in very bad condition.

Once, when a friend of mine moved out of the country she locked her bike to a streetlight and gave me the key telling me it was mine if I wanted it. It was nothing special but I picked it up and put quite a few km on it before I passed it on to someone else. If I hadn't it might still be there.

I'm not sure what the city does, but the bike posts seem fairly clear of bikes, so I'm guessing they much remove them frequently. The univerisities all put notes on the seats for a week, then go and clip them off and donate the bikes to either the on-campus bike library or to the bike co-op.

I'm on the bike co-op board, and whenever we're running low on decent bikes to fix up and sell, all we have to do is call up campus security and we'll have another pile to pick up.

Tell me about it. I see dozens of them on my school's campus everyday. It boils down to three things:

1. Expensive failure. Most commonly seen in BSOs that litter the landscape. I've seen bikes that seemingly bent a wheel in strong winds. Of course, being BSOs, it's usually cheaper to just abandon them in perfectly good parking spaces. Extremely relative. Some will dump $$$ into fixing BSOs while others will abandon them.

2. Stolen components. Common, but less so than #1. I've even been a victim of this, but I came back for the bike with a new wheel. Word has it somebody actually abandoned a Cannondale R400 (sold at the school's auction) because the rear wheel was stolen. Second-hand gossip, but I had the good fortune of buying a Marin Larkspur frame that was stripped down to the cranks in my size for $5 (legally, of course). So it happens.

3. The bike is unnecessary or they rider has bought a new one. I have friends who basically leave their bikes on campus because they don't like to ride home and back. So these bikes may look abandoned, but may not necessarily be. They are usually in poor maintenance, though.

Of course, there are the WTF reasons. One of my friends, for instance, abandoned a brand-new cruiser bike because he had nowhere to put it during the summer. It was an Electra bike, so a step up from the gas-pipes. Then there was the time I saw perfectly good Cannondale V500 abandoned for no good reason as it was parked outside the same building in the same space day in day out. Of course, as I didn't see any notices, I assume it was either taken home or sold to a good home.

The transportation department does a bi-annual auction where they make some serious cash off this crap. You routinely see Huffy and Magnas go for $100. There are the odd Treks and Specialized bikes, but most people are smart enough to take them home. 'course, being the ...questionable sort they are, sometimes you wonder if these bikes really were abandoned to begin with. I quite clearly remember seeing a "WARNING! THIS BIKE MAY BE ABANDONED, IF SO, WE WILL CUT THE LOCKS ETC ETC" notice attached to some clearly not-abandoned bikes including a pair of brand-new Bianchi fixed-gears.

Someone left a Magna ( Walmart brand, I think ) bike leaned against my last building when they moved out. The guy said he wore out the drive train, so he bought a new bike. I was shocked; we're talking $10 for a chain and $25 for a cassette. But the owner told me the whole bike was only $100, and now he has a different style. I wonder if that one has been abandoned yet?

I was going to raid it for spare parts, but there was nothing worth having. Next, I tried to find it a new home, but I wasn't able to give it away before the garbage people came and hauled it away. Sad.

Ahhh! I hate this also and dont understand why its done! At my job theres some bike posts that are right outside of where the police officer sits. Theres only 5 spots to park your bike and 2 of them are taken up by locked bikes that have been there for about 3-4 months straight! I havent made a formal complaint but one day i pointed it out to the officer on duty. He just said that he knew they had been there for a while and pretty soon they will have to be removed. That was like a month ago, so im hoping that day comes soon. Sometimes i even wish they got stolen lol

There are dozens of clearly abandoned bikes on the racks at metro stations around DC -- some, as mentioned before, probably suffered catastrophic failure, and others clearly suffer from component theft. I wonder if, in some cases, the 'owner' lost the key to the lock, or forgot the combination... I also wonder how many of these abandoned bikes were stolen or bought under questionable circumstances. Of course, I have to admit, I have a bike locked up here at work that only moves once a week or so, when I decide to do a lunch time errand but didn't ride. It is waiting for me to take it home for repairs.

Hypothetically -- if someone else never saw your bike get moved that one time per week, and they noticed that it needed repairing... wouldn't they think it's abandoned?

Yep. And I do think about this. In my defense: The tires are kept reasonably well inflated, the needed repairs probably aren't obvious from a casual visual inspection, and I make an effort to lock it in different spots each time I ride it, to minimize the 'not moving' appearance. But yeah, it could look abandoned.

Now, if you're also saying that some of the bikes I mentioned at the metro stations are not abandoned either, it is possible... though the ones without wheels for the past 4-6 months are pretty much a dead giveaway.

there is a novara mt bike that i park next to everyday in my company's garage. it's been there for a year and a half (since I started locking my bike in that garage). the dummy ran the lock through the fork only, so popping off the quick release, removing the front wheel, sliding the cable off the fork and replacing the wheel would get me a decent mt bike and free up some space. i've been tempted...I'd like to just free up some space and fix up the bike for an aspiring commuter (if I could locate one). my company's solution, install more racks (words only, no action in the last 9 months).

When I departed the Great Lakes Navy Training Center in 1980, I was in such a hurry I left my bike chained up to the bike rack in the barracks. I was 100 or so miles down the road when it dawned on me that I had forgot the bike. It was winter and I was on my way to San Diego. Hope someone found good use for the bike.....