Bike Rack Around the World

I'm an advance person. Which means I go ahead of a principal (generally a politician/elected official), in advance of their arrival, and make sure their movements are secured and everything is set in place, whether it be a meeting, a rally, or a press conference. While it seems like this could be an almost...glamorous job (lots of travel to interesting places, face time with high-profile public figures, inside information on sensitive material - ok, maybe not the last part), lots of times it takes a ton of grunt work. Like, lots of grunt work.

This is where bike rack comes in.

Bike rack, for most of the world, is generally an object, generally about eight feet long in length and three and a half feet tall, constructed of metal tubing and used for either:

a) storing bicycles not in use

b) some sort of barricade seen at rock concerts, marathon runs, or any other blocking off public space for some purpose.

For me, it's b) and so much more.

Bike rack is used everywhere for political events - to create a "buffer" area from the stage to the crowd, to corral the press, to create defined space somewhere that otherwise might be undefinable. It's both the greatest thing since sliced bread and the most annoying thing ever - mostly cause it's unwieldy, (usually) quite heavy and the biggest pain to store, transport and even unlock from one another.

Which is why it catches my eye every time I go somewhere and I see a mass of it.

What really piques my interest is how this barricade system - once only used for the lowly purpose of storing bikes not in use - became the go-to way for crowd control. I mean, this stuff is everywhere! Not just in the US, but across the earth.

Bike rack has gone global.

The purpose of this blog is to record sightings of bike rack. World-wide. Truly, people, we are all one people if the way we corral each other is to use bike rack. I mean, we can achieve world peace - our differences cannot be so obtuse if we're blocking off entrances to things with the same method, right? Right.

If you have a photo of bike rack - send it my way, with the location of the photo and how it was being used, to ciskandar (at) gmail (dot) com.

Photo of bike rack above - off the Champs Elysee in Paris.

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