Great Western Coffee Shop

Local newspaper The Herald reports that GWR and BT Police will remove cycles deemed to have been ?abandoned? at Oxford and Didcot stations.

It quotes a notice that BTP is apparently threatening to affix to such bikes:

"Dear Cyclist, due to the high number of abandoned bikes at Oxford Railway Station, Great Western Railway (GWR) and British Transport Police (BTP) will be carrying out a cull of all the cycle racks.

You are required to remove your bike. If your bike has not been removed by the week commencing 22 February 2021 it will be deemed that your bike has been abandoned and will be removed.

Great Western Railway will take ownership of the bike and dispose of the property.?

This isn't the first time this has been done, and it does make sense to get any cycles which have been abandoned and are clogging up facilities out of the way.  However

1. I wonder how BTP choose which cycles to affix the notices to, and if that cycle is in use (although a bit scruffy) how the owner can carry on using it there through and beyond the last week in February - or whether part of the cull / tidy up is to make cycling from the station only available for those people who's bikes look good - a sort of beauty contest where the old and battered are kicked out.

2. We are currently in lockdown and many people have been ordered not to travel and work from home, or to learn from home.  Including many people who in normal times would be coming into Oxford for face to face educational reasons.   Is it valid essential travel to come into Oxford to check / retrieve the bicycle you expected to come back to at the starts of this month, and how will students even know they need to do so?

I think the answer to point 1 is that they don't choose, they simply attach notices to all bikes parked in the relevant area. All bikes with notices attached come the relevant date are removed (and presumably auctioned off?). There is no initial selection process.

Point 2 does mean that a lot of bikes removed are actually likely to be "in use but on furlough" so speak.

Any chance of a link to the story in the Herald or elsewhere? I had a look on the Herald website (https://www.heraldseries.co.uk/news/hsdidcotnews/) but couldn't find it.

"In a now-deleted tweet, Oxfordshire's British Transport Police warned cyclists that they have until February 22 to remove their bikes."
 
-
Oxford Mail (https://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/19017537.police-will-remove-abandoned-bikes-oxford-didcot-stations/)

Most liked reader comment:

and I note:

That deleted tweet suggests that BTP & GWR are having second thoughts about the cull, or have decided that now is not the time to do it.

I understand the cull is a more or less annual undertaking, necessary because of the number of bikes abandoned by departing students and tourists. But lockdown really does seem the wrong time for it.

My daughter was at Oxford and every summer the colleges cleared out the abandoned cycles.

Going back a generation plus, at Cambridge students in the mid-seventies registered their bikes and would have a number painted on it (usually on the rear mudguard, an essential feature I note that is often missing from contemporary bikes), so the annual cull could easily be confined to unregistered bikes or those registered to students who had graduated and left. I don't know if this was (or is) done in Oxford, but it should help identify abandoned student bikes. 

Can't say I remember such a scheme but then (with modern shame) I think my bike was abandoned in the Hall racks when I got my first motorbike, and it in turn was abandoned in Catz's beautiful round bike shed when its engine seized. The past is a another planet ...  :(

Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa