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  • Bikes advertising things? Great! The more bikes that are seen around the urban environment, the better. Some might be memorials, but why should that be the primary function, or even associated with the colour white? I might put a black bike somewhere as a memorial if I felt like it. On the other hand, you can't just stick a bike somewhere and expect people to understand that it's a memorial. The information attached to recent ghost bikes is good because it gives them meaning for those not necessarily in the know.

    Vandalised bikes like James Foster's ghost bike (Essex Road outside Mosquito) are not good. It made me sad when I saw it (having previously seen it intact). But I thought, pretty much all memorials get vandalised occasionally, whether they are in cemeteries or, say, a war memorial. Why should bike memorials be different? They need to be maintained, they can't just be abandoned.

    The ghost bike idea is good at least because it's controversial and stimulates debate.
    Talking to a small shop about their advertising is just part of that debate that develops. It raises awareness, although it's always important to be careful that it doesn't make cycling sound horribly dangerous.

    (By no means everybody is in favour of ghost bikes. Some people argue that it exaggerates danger to cyclists. What about the 200+ pedestrians who are mown down by motorists in London every year? Others feel ghost bike memorials really help them in focusing their grief and concern. In any case, the awareness raising achieved by them must be accompanied by concrete steps to make things better or ghost bikes risk becoming some kind of compensation for lack of improvement.)

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