Where Packard Avenue meets Broadway Avenue at the bottom of the hill, there is a white bicycle adorned with flowers. This bicycle marks the spot where a 70-year-old man named Stephen Conley was killed while riding his bike in 2022. A lifelong resident of Somerville with a wife, three children and a grandchild, Conley was a block away from the Medford/Somerville campus when a car opened its door into the bike lane and pushed him into traffic.
There’s another white bike like this in Porter Square and yet another by the Somerville Market Basket on Park Street. These “ghost bikes” can be found across the Boston area, marking the sites of bicyclist fatalities.
Most of these ghost bikes have been placed by bicycle advocate Peter Cheung, who is on the board of the Boston Cyclists Union.
“The purpose of the ghost bike is to memorialize a cyclist that has been killed, and it’s usually placed at the crash site. It’s meant to make a tragic place into a more holy, solemn place,” Cheung said. “The phrase we use at the [dedication] ceremony is to ‘transform a place of death to a place of life.’ It also serves as a reminder for drivers and motorists, and also cyclists, to be aware and to share the road — for everybody, for all road users.”
Drew Nelson is a senior in the Resumed Education for Adult Learning program. He moved to Boston nine years ago to dance professionally for the Boston Ballet, and he has since spent many years using a bicycle for everyday transportation. Nelson is now the head mechanic at Tufts Bikes and also volunteers with the South End branch of the Community Pedal Power E-bike Lending Library.
“I moved to Boston in 2015. I bought a bike right away, and one of the first trips that I took was out to Harvard,” Nelson said. “On the way back I saw this white bike chained to a post at [Massachusetts Avenue] and Beacon Street in Boston and later found out that it was a bicyclist who was killed a couple weeks before I moved to Boston. Since then, I’ve been to about half a dozen ghost bike ceremonies.”
Jon Ramos lives in West Somerville and bikes around the Tufts area every day with his 7-year-old daughter and 4-year-old son. According to Ramos, he and his children pass a number of ghost bikes on the way to school, soccer and ice skating.
“We talk about it a lot. Both my kids know what ghost bikes are and what they mean,” Ramos said. “I don’t shy them away from that.”
Cheung has been creating ghost bikes for over nine years. Each ghost bike is designed to be permanently installed at the crash site. Cheung sources all the bikes he uses as ghost bikes from Bikes Not Bombs, a nonprofit bicycle store that aims to use the bicycle as a vehicle to help achieve economic mobility for marginalized people in the Boston area and the Global South.
“I usually like to tailor make it to the person that’s passed away, if it’s a little kid, or a female style [bike], or a roadie bike, to try to make it more personalized,” Cheung said.
Each time a ghost bike is placed, there is a dedication ceremony.
“At one point, we will all reach out … and touch the bike or touch a person that’s touching the bike. It’s like a human chain, we all form a bond. That’s when we actually dedicate the ghost bike,” Cheung said.
Cheung prioritizes involving the family of the victim in the ceremony, which sometimes results in a time gap between the death and the installation of a ghost bike.
“Usually after a fatality, the families don’t want to really talk about a ghost bike because they’re dealing with the funeral services and the grief of a passed loved one. So, we tread lightly,” Cheung said.
Nelson has attended a number of ghost bike ceremonies over the years.
“I remember George [Clemmer’s] ghost bike ceremony at [Massachusetts Avenue] and Huntington [Avenue],” he said. “There was just this insanely stark contrast between our small ceremony of mourning and the incredibly loud traffic from trucks and large vehicles surrounding us constantly.”
In addition to serving as a memorial, ghost bikes bring attention to the need for safe infrastructure at the crash site and in the Boston area in general.
“The third high-profile ghost bike that I placed was for Anita Kermann, at the corner of Beacon Street and [Massachusetts Avenue] in Back Bay. A big truck made a right hook, right turn and killed her,” Cheung said. “Since then, they’ve had protected bike lanes put at that location.”
Boston has been making progress towards having a safe network of cycling infrastructure. Still, according to Nelson, there’s a lot of room for improvement.
“The difference between 2015 and now is huge. We are very close to having a completed network of relatively safe bike lanes that can take you from one part of the greater Boston area completely to the opposite end. They’re not on every street, and we certainly have a long way to go,” Nelson said.
Despite improvements in infrastructure over the last ten years, there have been several high-profile cycling deaths this year near Tufts in Cambridge. In June, Kim Staley, a 55-year-old mother of two visiting from Florida, was struck and killed by a box truck in Harvard Square. Two weeks later, a 24-year-old Ph.D. student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology named Minh-Thi Nguyen was killed in the exact same manner in Kendall Square.
Most recently, 62-year-old John Corcoran was hit and killed by an oncoming SUV while riding his bike on the path on Memorial Drive in Cambridge. Corcoran was a graduate of Harvard University and father to two current Harvard students.
Ramos rides his bicycle every week on the way to work past the place where Corcoran was killed.
“I’m very angry. I feel like that could have been anyone. It could have been me, could’ve been my kids, could’ve been a woman with a stroller, it could’ve been a group of students,” Ramos said.
The ghost bike marking Corcoran’s death on Memorial Drive is the most recent in the Boston area. Several hundred bicyclists attended the ceremony to dedicate Corcoran’s ghost bike and call for improvements to the safety of Memorial Drive.
Near the Medford/Somerville campus, College Avenue presents an area of very high risk to students and community members trying to ride a bicycle.
“For anyone who goes to Tufts, they know the experience of crossing College [Avenue],” Nelson said. “I am dreading the day we have to install a ghost bike on College [Avenue], and I think it’s only a matter of time.”
In addition to Tufts students, this area is also heavily used by parents as they take their young kids to swim lessons run by the swim team at the Steve Tisch Sports and Fitness Center.
“I find that whole section of College [Avenue] heading down that hill to be just absolutely treacherous for people on bikes,” Ramos said. “I think because there’s often traffic up near the main intersection on Boston [Avenue], once people see the green light, they hit the gas and they go fast.”
Better infrastructure on College Avenue would improve things for both community members and students. Just a few changes would make great strides toward improving bicycle safety at Tufts.
“Professors Row is a great way to get through, and Packard Ave is wide enough [that] you could fit protected bike lanes in both directions,” Ramos said. “If you had [bike lanes on] Professors Row and Packard [Avenue] and College [Avenue], that’s all you would need because most of the network would feed into those streets.”
And, according to Ramos, Tufts is in a position to make the changes needed.
“Tufts University has so much land in the area that they’re the primary stakeholder for a lot of the roads that go around their campus, and they have the opportunity to be real leaders here,” Ramos said. “I think the towns are really eager to build this kind of stuff, but they don’t want to have a battle with a university. But, if the university came to the table saying ‘This is what we want,’ I think it’d get done really quickly.”
Though ghost bikes sometimes serve as a tool for advocacy, at the heart of every ghost bike is a person who left behind friends and family after they were killed.
“Every time we do one, we say, ‘Oh, this is the last one,’ and I’ve created almost 30 of them. Next year will be 10 years of me doing it, and I don’t want to do them anymore,” Cheung said.
The ghost bike near Tufts stands as a reminder to make changes before someone is killed, not after.
“We need the leaders of Tufts to engage with the city of Somerville and the city of Medford … to advocate for safety … so that someone isn’t killed,” Nelson said. “I don’t want to be the one who gives the speech at a ghost bike ceremony on College [Avenue] because it will wreck me.”
