Finally! A Decent Time-Lapse Video Of A Bike Decomposing

Let me paint a picture for you. What do you think would happen in this situation? You have a beautiful bike with all the trimmings (bells, basket, lights, etc). You are riding it on the sidewalk in Soho (NYC), and you decide to chain it to a bike post while you go shopping. However, on this day, you never come back. What exactly do you think would happen to that bike? I love riding my bike all the time, and I live in a big city (Atlanta), so this was very interesting for me to see.

Red Peak Branding knows exactly what happened to a bike in that situation, and they put it all together for you in the time-lapse video below. This is part of a project called Lifecycle: 365 days in the life of a bike in NYC. They took a picture of the bike every day for 365 days and then complied it into this 51-second video. The psychology behind this experiment is fascinating to me. For 230 days, the bike was left untouched. The reason is probably because the people passing by on the street just assumed the owner of the bike was close by and would be returning soon.

Then someone finally took the basket off the bike and stole it. After that, I suppose people assumed the owner wasn’t coming back, so over the course of the next 40 days, the bike was completely disassembled by people who wanted the parts. Piece by piece, it was taken apart until it literally disappeared. I wonder how long it would take for this to happen in Atlanta. For some reason, I doubt it would last untouched for 230 days. #justsayin

Via: [Flavorwire] [Gawker]