Ghost Bike

Ghost Bikes are a type of roadside death memorial commemorating the death of a bicyclist, at or near the site where they died or where struck by a motorist. A bicycle is spray-painted white and secured to a sign, pole, or tree, accompanied by a small plaque or notice.

Pictured here is a Ghost Bike tribute to Jennifer Futrell, who was struck and killed by a van while riding her bike without a helmet on Bardstown Road in Louisville.


The world as we know it is filled with what I call "Unsolvable Problems", and the neverending Bikes vs. Cars dilemma is one of the biggest and most unsolvable. When I'm in my car, I hate bicyclists, and when I'm on my bike, I despise motorists. There's just no way around the dichotomy. It is simply the way of things, no matter how awesome bicycles are.

Let's face it, for all the talk of "sharing the road", something flimsy and unprotected that is only going a few MPH just cannot, cannot, cannot coexist with sturdy metal things that are going 30-60 MPH or faster. It cannot happen. It cannot work. No matter how much we all want it to. It's just asking for more tragic accidents to happen.

It also doesn't help that many bike lanes - a hard-fought gesture though they were - are ridiculously, uselessly small and often filled with the usual urban debris that tends to gravitate towards the curb. When I'm on a bike, I often curse the narrow East-End slivers of pavement that I'm expected to stay inside, and I go outside the lines whenever necessary. But later that same day, when I'm driving a car, I curse other bicyclists who do the exact same thing and nearly get us both killed.

There's just no getting around this admittedly hypocritical conflict. Even if we added a third, bicycle-only, full-sized lane to every road in existence (which obviously will never happen), there'd be no realistic way to prevent cars from driving in it. As with current smaller bike lanes, it would probably just encourage idiots to park their cars in them, and idiots are unfortunately here to stay.

So what is the answer? There isn't one. That's why it's called an Unsolvable Problem. Cars and bikes will eternally clash - literally - as long as both are expected to occupy the same space. However, some cities have experimented with instituting French Quarter-like "car-free zones" where only bicycles, horses, and pedestrians are allowed. I'd love to see this idea take off in Kentucky cities. (For starters, let's permanently get rid of automobile thru-traffic at Fourth Street Live.)

Myself, next Spring I plan on toolin' around the town in this Pedal Surrey which I plan to modify to include an onboard mp3 sound system, GPS, and handlebar-mounted Blackberry. Plus a few James Bond kinda devices which we mustn't speak of here.

Roadside Monument, LaGrange Road

A roadside death monument on Highway 146 (LaGrange Road), in Whipps Millgate, KY.

Roadside Death Markers

The tradition of erecting a roadside memorial marker began in the South (and Kentucky was one of the first) but has gradually spread nationwide during the second half of the twentieth century.

It’s increasingly common for grieving friends and relatives to place some sort of marker by the side of the road near where a loved one died in an automobile accident. Problem is, there are a lot of automobile accidents in the world. And the markers start to accumulate. Some particularly bad stretches of road are so dotted with these sad crosses that they’re perpetuating the dangerousness of the location: I don’t know for a fact that anyone has died yet because their attention was diverted from a bad curve while checking out all the roadside memorials, but I’d lay money on the odds that it’s happened.

Some cities, towns and counties have even gone to war with citizens over these crosses. They’re becoming a public nuisance and an eyesore, say some. Although it certainly seems fair to allow a grace period for such memorials, they obviously can’t stay there forever, can they? Many families insist that yes, they must - and stake their claim on these spots in perpetuity. It’s a problem for many police officers or roadside cleanup crewmembers who can’t bring themselves to take them down, even when ordered to do so. And what do you do with them then - just throw them away? To many, this would be tantamount to grave desecration, even though no one’s actually buried there.

While researching the Weird Kentucky book, I spoke to one Calloway County woman who explained to me why her daughter’s roadside memorial is so important to her, even more so than her grave: it’s the last place her daughter was alive.

Although ghosts, spirits, the paranormal, an afterlife, and other such topics weren’t directly mentioned, it was clear that the location where her daughter last existed is far more important and powerful than the location where her body was buried. Whether people actually think this out in detail, the inference seems to be that there’s a greater likelihood of someone’s spirit dwelling near the place of their tragic death, than their burial site. Instictively, we as a species seem to just subliminally know that we are not our bodies.

It may seem grisly and macabre to obsess on these primitively constructed private-yet-public memorials to tragic deaths, but no more so than tombstone enthusiasts, one would think. Are roadside memorials not a pure form of folk art? Regardless of how one rationalizes one’s interest, these memorials are quite fascinating and speak a lot more about the human condition than any cemetery.