The Bicycle Orphans of Sapporo

When the first snowfall hit, it seemed that most people stopped riding their bikes. This makes sense because it was icy and slippery through the snowy months, but the boggling part is that people just flat stop riding. They don't bring their bike home, pack it away nicely for the winter and wait for clear streets to ride on again. No, they just leave their bike wherever they were the night of the first big snowfall. The result is hundreds of bikes parked along the sides of sidewalks that get covered by the snowplows as they clean the streets.

I can imagine that more than a few snowblower operators through the winter have the unfortunate experience of munching a hidden bike while trying to clear a massive pile of snow from in front of their building. And it has been strangely sad to watch the snowbanks melt back and lonely bikes emerge from the shrinking mound.

Recently, as more and more bikes have been appearing, notes have been taped to the seats of many of them. Of course, being the illiterate imbecile that I am here, I can't read the kanji that is scrawled on the notes, however it seems that the notes are used to determine if someone is coming back for the bike or if it has become one of the hundreds of orphaned bikes of Sapporo. The city periodically collects these orphaned bikes, I am sure in part to clear the sidewalks to allow pedestrian passage.

Today the city, in partnership with the University Co-Op, hosted a bike redistribution for the foreign students at Hokudai. So it seems, that the orphaned bikes will have a home after all. Shawn and I went down to the bike distribution to adopt a ride for him for the upcoming summer. Here are a couple of pics from the event.



The ironic part of this bike abandonment and redistribution, is that they rigorously track the identification numbers of the bikes. Each bike is liscenced with the police and if you are stopped (an occurance which is unusually common for foreigners - they should maybe check us for cockroaches while they are at it) without your papers or without the records in order with the police, you can be charged with stealing the bike. Yes, that's right, charged with stealing the bike that was recently hauled out of a snowbank and given away to keep it from ending up in a landfill. So I guess the lesson here is, don't go cutting out the middle man and just help yourself to the orphaned bikes. When the snow melts in the spring, wait until you can fill out multiple copies of paperwork to get the bike from the snowbank.