mapping

Last week, the New York Times ran a sober photo essay on the ghost bikes that Visual Resistance and Time’s Up! have been installing around New York City since June 2005. The bikes are public interventions, a grassroots action in the spirit of graffiti memorial walls. The bikes are painted white and chained near the site where a cyclist was killed by an automobile, along with a plaque with their name and the date they were killed. Several are plotted on this map.

The bikes were inspired by a similar project in St. Louis, and have since appeared in cities across the U.S. and the U.K.

A 2005 report on bicycle fatalities from the New York City police, parks, health, and transportation departments reports that between 1996 and 2005, 225 bicyclists were killed in crashes with motor vehicles. Between 1996 and 2003, 3,462 NYC bicyclists were seriously injured in crashes.While the annual number of serious injuries has decreased, deaths remained steady during the 10-year period.

The statistics show a failure of urban design and policy — 89% of crashes occurred at or near intersections, 92% of bicyclist fatalities resulted from crashes with motor vehicles — as well as the absence of personal equipment: 97% of the bicyclists who died were not wearing a helmet. 74% of the fatal crashes involved a head injury.

While it’s clear that helmets save lives, something else is broken in NYC: of the 3,964 transportation-related deaths in New York City between 1996 and 2005, only 6% were cyclists. Almost half the deaths (49%) were pedestrians.

A billboard I designed is up on display in Los Angeles. It’s part of a series of public art installations about the war, and will be on view until October 8, 2006.

The image is a map of Selected CIA Aircraft Routes and Rendition Flights 2001-2006, some of which transported prisoners to foreign countries to be interrogated and tortured. After years of silence and denial, the administration publicly acknowledged the flights in the last few weeks.

I worked with artist and geographer Trevor Paglen who provided the data. Trevor spent several years tracking down the flight information, and has a book out this month on his investigations, Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA’s Rendition Flights. See this interview with him on Democracy Now! with co-author, journalist A.C. Thompson.

The billboard is located at 6150 Wilshire Boulevard, near South Fairfax Ave, between Beverly Hills and West Hollywood. Here’s a Google Map.

Clockshop, a public arts organization in Los Angeles, funded the display. You can read more about the project at http://clockshop.org/here.php

A few images, below: