August 10, 2007

I READ about the plight of a "Concerned Southampton Resident" in The Royal Gazette recently and can sympathise with the problem of getting anyone to respond to abandoned bikes. This has happened to me on several occasions.

Apparently, some of our underage younger persons manage to get hold of old bikes and put old, dubiously acquired license plates on them to make the bikes appear legal. They ride them around, for example, the old Railway Right of Way. When the bikes break down, or the youngsters are chased by the police, they simply abandon the bikes wherever they happen to be. Tracing the legitimate owners of these bikes is well nigh impossible based on my own experience.

After my initial frustration, I quickly found a simple and inexpensive way to deal with the matter. Take the offending bikes to the main road, away from your residence or a tourist attraction like the Railroad Trail and simply leave them there.

After several days the bikes disappear, presumably picked up by one of the organisations which declined to deal with the problem in the first place when asked.

Some will tell you this solution is illegal. If that is in fact the case, so what? It was illegal to dump the bikes on public or private property in the first place. And why should I assume the responsibility to hire a truck to dispose of someone else's discarded bike if it ends up being dumped on my land? If the bureaucracy was pro-active and became a part of the solution (rather than being part of the problem), I wouldn't need to seek this no-cost disposal method.

Hopefully this will help the Southampton complainant and others to deal with similar bike problems.

ANOTHER SOUTHAMPTON RESIDENT