When walking through Tokyo we occasionally come upon a lonely bicycle, and I often wonder if it is abandoned or lost. Most people would wonder how you could lose a bicycle, but actually after a good night out, forgetting where you parked is quite easy.

When we set out to do this photo series, we realized that these lonely bicycles generally fall into three categories – abandoned, lost, or loveless. We will explain these further down with some pictures.

This bicycle has a clear owner as it is locked in a parking space where there is an apartment. The opening photo at the top of this article is an abandoned artifact as it is at the end of an alley and just left to rot. This is the rarest form, since ward offices throughout Tokyo have teams that go around and write citations on illegally parked bicycles. Then periodically a collection team in a truck goes around and abandoned or lost bicycles are rescued and stored in a storage area (the last picture in the series below) for a period of time, then sent for recycling.

One wonders how the bicycles here go so long without being collected by the bicycle collection patrol. There are a variety of reasons, but the most basic is that an abandoned bicycle may go unnoticed, parked down a dead-end alley, or locked to a rail outside an apartment; making it difficult to collect.

This artifact is most likely lost since it is parked on a street lined with bars. The rider probably left it as he or she was coming out of a bar inebriated, but subsequently forgot where they ended up that night. Tokyo can be a fun place to go out, and bicycles are quite often the ones left behind after all of the festivities.

Our research shows that lost bicycles have increased quite a bit since the outset of the pandemic. Before the pandemic, bicycle recycling requests were steadily falling, but recent statistics show a sharp increase in recycling requests (Japanese link).

This one next to a pedestrian overpass is actually a nice bicycle and falls into the grey area between abandoned and lost. Lost bicycles, like the one above are usually parked close to bars or within red light districts – where the patron does not even remember where they left the bicycle. This bicycle is parked within a couple meters of a drinking establishment. Most impressive is that the lock does nothing to prevent anyone from stealing the bicycle!

With a little research we discovered that the bicycle below is abandoned as the building dwellers do not own the bicycle, nor do they have any rights to remove the bicycle – other than reporting it to the ward office.

We will conclude this photo series with a picture of the storage area where these bicycles are eventually taken prior to recycling. The numbers that come through this facility are exponential when compared to the number of properly recycled bicycles from the above link. One thing that is interesting to note is that some of these bicycles are not necessarily throw-away items! Many of the bikes shown here were not inexpensive when originally purchased and would still be good transportation if given some LOVE.