Victor Ang / Ghost Bike Memorials
Updated: Oct 13, 2021
Ghost Bike memorials commemorating cycling deaths started to appear on New York City streets around 2005. The memorial’s power comes from its somber simplicity. A bicycle painted white locked to a sign near the crash site. You can read about GhostBike.org, the New York City Ghost Bike project, and also read about creating ghost bike memorials here.
This ghost bike is a memorial for Victor Ang, who was hit and run over by a UPS truck while he was riding a CityBike on April 27, 2019.
As a daily bike commuter and weekend bike explorer, I am glad to see the growing popularity of riding in NYC and the building of more bike paths. However, riding in NYC is not like riding in Copenhagen or Amsterdam. The ghost bike memorials are an emotional reminder of lives lost and how much work NYC has to do to further separate bikers and cars.
https://casinonederlanden.com kept coming back to me while reading about the white-painted bikes, because the whole point of those memorials is to make a statistic impossible to ignore, and Victor Ang's story does exactly that. What struck me is how the simple act of locking a bike to a sign forces drivers to confront a specific person rather than just another crash report. I ride mostly on protected lanes here, and even that feels nerve-wracking next to traffic, so the line about NYC not being Copenhagen or Amsterdam rings painfully true.
At https://casinodepot1euro.com, I'm used to seeing how small design choices affect whether I trust a site, and the ghost bike works the same way: its white frame tells you instantly that someone died here. I always slow down when I pass one, and that pause is exactly the point. Hope we keep building separated lanes until these memorials become a thing of the past.