Ghost Bikes of Queens

Author

Brianna Caszatt, The Graduate Center, City University of New YorkFollow

Date of Degree

6-2024

Document Type

Capstone Project

Degree Name

M.A.

Program

Digital Humanities

Advisor

Aránzazu Borrachero Mendívil

Subject Categories

Digital Humanities

Keywords

ghost bikes, Queens, New York, sites of memory

Abstract

Traffic violence is an all-too-common experience in New York, but after a crash is cleaned up, what’s left? The violence is hidden, the infrastructure resumes its seemingly neutral existence, the streets continue to be dominated by cars, and the cycle repeats itself. Ghost bikes—bikes that have been painted white and placed near the site where a cyclist was killed—stand in opposition to this cycle. They serve as both a grassroots memorial and a call to action. Ghost Bikes of Queens (https://bri-caszatt.github.io/ghost_bikes_queens/) is a digital memory project that serves as a virtual memorial and furthers that call to action.

The project comprises three main parts: an interactive map of all ghost bikes in the borough, including pop-ups with the cyclists’ names and information about the crash sites; a written interview with a Ghost Bike Project volunteer; and multiple visual/art activist components.

Because of the physical and social circumstances surrounding them, ghost bikes are temporal and at risk of being taken down—during street or other nearby construction projects or because (I assume) they are seen as eyesores or unofficial and therefore unimportant. Through my digital memory project, I put missing bikes back on the map, as well as provide a space for digital preservation for those that are still up. Ghost bikes can also be easy to overlook in a dense cityscape if you don’t know what they are. Furthermore, if/when you only see one ghost bike, it can be tempting to dismiss it as a tragic “accident,” but seeing all of them together on the map, you can more readily view them as symptomatic of a systemic and infrastructural problem—and one that isn’t going away. So this project also raises awareness.

The making and placing of bikes takes a lot of volunteer work; I also hope this project inspires some of my audience to be a part of and continue this vital work. Though some ghost bikes are active memorial sites still maintained by family and friends of the deceased, many ghost bikes exist in their physical landscape without any context or information about the person who died there. Through my project, I aim to help my audiences understand ghost bikes in the collective sense, while also ensuring each person who was killed is remembered as such, rather than a statistic.

Comments

Online component: https://bri-caszatt.github.io/ghost_bikes_queens/

Recommended Citation

Caszatt, Brianna, "Ghost Bikes of Queens" (2024). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/5890