Re-cycle or recycle?

My father was over from California last week. It was great to have the time to wander around both Stockholm and Uppsala and just talk with him, especially when the weather was so cooperative.

During our walks he noticed something that I have become a bit immune to during the 9 years and 2 days that I have lived here - our streets are populated by scads of apparantly abandoned bicycles. Look around and you will see them - locked up and resting on flat tires, chains hopelessly rusted and sporting layers of patina thicker than Christer Lindarw's makeup. In the case of Uppsala many are decorated with evidence of time spent awash in the tea-colored trickle that passes for a scenic urban waterway. Some might have potential preservation value, but many were scarcely roadworthy even when new and would definitely qualify as a shop mechanic's nightmare in the unlikely event that somebody would attempt to restore it to some level of satisfactory working order.

I realize that those rusting hulks have owners, but what kind of respect do we as the public owe to people who buy crap bikes from crap retailers, and then proceed to lock up and abandon their trash in public places?

We can't necessarily wait for Markus to fulfill his destiny as benevolent dictator-for-life, so I propose that the Ministry of Cycle Culture act as judge, jury and executioner when it comes to cleaning up our streets. If gangs from the other side of the Baltic can drive around with bolt cutters and panel vans removing the best bikes from our streets without the police doing anything about it, it shouldn't be to troublesome to do the same thing with crap bikes. Perhaps even go around a week in advance and put notices on the bikes first, just in case some of the heaps aren't quite as abandoned as they appear to be. Put some official-looking signage on the truck and get some uniforms and badges. Why not have some flyers and business cards on hand to pass out to the curious? (is there a better way to keep people from getting too interested?) Start up that cutting saw and stack the dead in the truck like cordwood. Sort into re-cyclers (stuff worth keeping) and recyclers and clean up the streets.

Don't get me wrong - I am not advocating the removal of anything that has been ridden within the past several months, and I cannot approve of the destruction of bikes that have a reasonable potential of returning to a state of usefulness. This is just about the removal of public trash that just happens to resemble my favorite form of transport.

I need Bo to serve as judge and jury, a few other guys with power tools, a nice truck to take care of the half-decent stuff and a few trucks from Ragn Sells to crush the crap bikes. We meet at the bike parking lot in front of the train station in Uppsala on Monday, September 17 at 10.00.

What do you think?