Traffic violence is an all too common, yet hidden, experience in New York City. After a crash site is cleaned up, the infrastructure resumes its seemingly neutral existence, and the streets continue to be dominated by cars. Ghost bikes—bikes painted white and placed near the site where a cyclist was killed—bring traffic violence to the foreground. They stand as monuments for those we’ve lost, but they also represent an act of love, looking toward a future with safer streets; they serve as both a grassroots memorial and a call to action. Ghost Bikes of Queens is a digital memory project that aims to serve as a virtual memorial and to further that call to action.
According to the Ghost Bike Project, artists and activists began putting up ghost bikes around New York City in 2005, inspired by projects in other cities. Since then, over 160 ghost bikes have been placed around the city, more than 60 of which are (or were) in Queens.
Although it is not the intention of those creating and installing 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 not deemed worthy of preservation. Through my digital project, I am putting missing bikes back on the map, as well as providing 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 it as a systemic and infrastructural problem—and one that isn’t going away. So this project is also about raising awareness; once more people know what ghost bikes are, I think they will begin to see them—and engage with them—more.
The making and placing of bikes takes a lot of volunteer work; I also hope this project inspires some of my audiences 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 the 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 that each individual who was killed is remembered as a person who lived and not overlooked as just a statistic.
This project is a master’s capstone submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Digital Humanities in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts, The City University of New York.
This project is a continuation of much of my work throughout this master’s degree program. I first started thinking about ghost bikes as a lesser visible aspect of the deathscape, which my Mapping Cemeteries team defined as “a landscape comprising both physical and notional spaces, as represented by burial sites, monuments, and the practices of care and memorialization related to death.” Since then, I’ve worked on three iterations of Ghost Bikes of Queens, examining them through a story map accompanied by data visualizations, a mapped video collage, and an interactive storytelling game. In this latest iteration of the project, I wanted to combine some aspects of all these: mapping and visual and textual storytelling.
This project started with an Excel dataset I’ve been compiling over several semesters. My dataset includes the locations of ghost bikes in Queens (by latitude and longitude, street intersection, neighborhood, and zip code) and the names and ages of the victims, as well as links to more information about the crashes. All of these data are publicly available, largely from ghostbikes.org, as well as various media sources. I have a contact, Steve Scofield, who works with the Ghost Bikes Project, and he shared with me the group’s Google docs containing information about the locations of current and future bikes in the city. I referred to their files to get the cyclists’ names and crash details, as it was more current than the ghostbikes.org site at the time. All of the information I used from their files is based on what is reported from various publicly available media sources, such as Streetsblog NYC.
My dataset lists all of the ghost bikes I found information for from the Ghost Bike Project, beginning in 2005 into February of 2024. There may be a few bikes unaccounted for from late 2023 into early 2024, and sadly there may have been more cyclist fatalities since I stopped collecting data. Furthermore, the data are also incomplete as there has not always been a name and/or age shared publicly for each crash victim.
In addition, I did decide to omit a few bikes from my dataset. In 2012 a ghost bike was placed at Queens Boulevard and Jackson Avenue as a memorial for all cyclists killed in that year; it has since been removed, but as it didn’t represent a specific cyclist killed in a specific incident, I didn’t include it in this project. I also omitted the ghost bike for George Arcarola, placed in 2016 at Queens Boulevard and Northern Boulevard (since removed), as he died of a heart attack while riding. I did keep ghost bike locations in my dataset for crashes that did not involve a vehicle, such as that for Lin-wen Chiang, when the crash was likely (if not certainly) the result of poorly maintained infrastructure (in Chiang’s case, a pothole wads not adequately fixed). I also included the ghost bike for Goubin Liu, for whom specific details of the crash are not available beyond the assumption he lost control of the ebike he was riding; this could be the result of an issue with the bike, but I thought it very likely that it could have been caused by something in the street design. In other words, as it’s not conclusively known the built environment didn’t play a role in this crash, I opted to include this bike in my dataset.
Lastly, in my wanderings around the borough, I found what appears to be a ghost bike that was installed by a group other than the Ghost Bike Project, on 34th Street at 30th Avenue in Astoria. There is no accompanying information at the site, nor has this location been accounted for in the documents shared with me by Scofield, nor have I been able to find anything specific about a cyclist-involved incident at this location by searching the internet. In speaking with Scofield, I learned the Ghost Bike Project is aware of other groups or individuals placing memorials around the city. Given the rest of the ghost bike data, it seems highly likely that this was a crash resulting from an unsafe built environment, so again I opted to include it until it could be definitively excluded.
I built the map using Leaflet, a JavaScript library. I used a freely available stock image of a bike outline as the “pins” on the map, visually reinforcing that this map can put back ghost bikes that have been taken down or not yet placed in the physical landscape. When you click on a bike, it opens a pop-up window that provides as much of the following information as is known: cyclist name and age, the date of the crash, the neighborhood and intersection of the crash, and a link to a media source for more information. Whenever possible, I have linked to the corresponding entry on ghostbikes.org as their website provides crash details found in media sources, but also sometimes information about the cyclists beyond the details surrounding their deaths and photographs of them shared by their loved ones.
For the actual map in the background, I chose a pale gray layer made available from OpenStreetMaps as I thought it had an ephemeral feel that compliments the ephemeral nature of the physical ghost bikes themselves.
I conducted an interview with Steve Scofield, a former MTA employee and current Ghost Bike Project volunteer, via email and Google doc over several weeks in March of 2024. He gave informed consent for me to both conduct the interview and share his answers and his identity publicly on my site and in this paper. The consent and release forms are shared here (see Digital Manifest) and also as a PDF in my GitHub repository. The forms were modified from Institutional Review Board (IRB)–approved templates used by my advisor for her oral history projects. Before conducting the interview, I also confirmed with the director of the Graduate Center’s Human Research Protection Program that one interview did not constitute human subjects research and therefore did not require IRB review and approval, only the use of approved consent and release forms.
I recorded the time-lapse video around sunrise on April 5, 2024, at the ghost bike for Salvador Chairez-Rodriguez at the intersection of 31st Avenue and 51st Street in Woodside. After testing different speed ratios around my apartment and in my backyard, I decided to use the hyperlapse setting at 10:1 speed ratio (10 minutes of recorded footage yielding 1 minute of playback footage) on my phone (a Samsung Galaxy S10). I attached it to a tripod and recorded for 40 minutes, starting from before first light until a few minutes after sunrise. I chose an angle and distance from the ghost bike that I hoped would feature the bike prominently while also being able to capture the contrasting movement around it.
The video is meant to record my bearing witness at the memorial site, and provide a means by which my audiences can also digitally bear witness here with me. The use of hyperlapse visually highlights a once-moving object (the bike) ceasing to move (the ghost bike), while also showcasing the ghost bike’s persistence as an act of care and memorialization against the backdrop of a busy and bustling city street and the passage of time.
The photo gallery showcases a selection of pictures I’ve taken on my visits to ghost bikes in the borough. All of them were taken on my phone (Samsung Galaxy S10). None of them have been edited, only sized within the CSS.
The photo on the homepage was also taken on my phone, and I edited it with GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program), an open-source alternative to Adobe Photoshop. I used the same bike icon from the map to put the ghost bike back at this location where it was taken down. This is the ghost bike location for Ana Rodriguez at 56th Road and 48th Street in Maspeth.
The text animation is a list of all the cyclists’ names, including an “Unnamed” for each ghost bike that doesn’t have a person’s name attached to it. I created the animation using CSS code I found via an internet search for CSS animation examples. As most of the physical ghost bike locations I’ve visited don’t include the names of the cyclists, I wanted to feature the names prominently on my site.
I used the animation to highlight the tension between remembering and forgetting inherent in all memorials for the deceased. I also thought it was a powerful visualization seeing them all stacked atop one another and at a relatively large font size such that they cannot all be taken in at once. I believe this reinforces my project goal to balance understanding the ghost bikes as both representing individual people and a much larger collective and systemic problem.
I built the Ghost Bikes of Queens website using a combination of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I wrote all of the code in the code editor Visual Studio Code. All of my code and other files are publicly available in my GitHub repository, and my site is hosted through GitHub Pages.
I used the OpenStreetMap to inspire most of my design choices (whites, grays, blacks). I wanted to create something clean and simple, with an ethereal feel.
Also, as much as possible, I tried to think about digital accessibility in the design of the site. I checked my color contrast between font and background colors with the WebAIM Contrast Checker tool. I also chose a heavier font weight and included a background color for the photo captions to keep them more readable atop their corresponding images, as well as including alt text for all images. In addition, I wrote the code as semantically as possible in my HTML files. I have also tested my site at different screen widths, to ensure it is still viewable/usable on a mobile device.