I spotted a bike in Brooklyn with a yellow DSNY “derelict bicycle” sticker on it, the kind that says “this will be removed in 7 days.” I’ve lived in NYC for years but never actually seen one of these in the wild before!

So I got curious: how often does this actually happen? How many bikes get reported as derelict or abandoned? What happens to them?

How many bikes get removed?

Short answer: not many.

Complaints about abandoned bikes grew from 88 in 2010 to an all-time peak of 2,588 in 2018, dipped during COVID, and have rebounded to roughly that level: 2,508 in 2024, 2,108 in 2025.

From 2021 onward, the removal rate hovers around 8-11%. Pre-2021 removal data is basically empty, so I assume DSNY just wasn’t logging it. But there’s a couple records, so maybe they weren’t actually removing anything until 2021?

Note that this 8-11% removal rate number is just “# removals divided by # complaints”, and doesn’t de-duplicate repeat complaints about the same bike.

There’s no unique bike ID in the data, so I tried deduplicating by address. Roughly a third of complaints are duplicates. One address in Bay Ridge (2030 76th Street) generated 122 complaints in 3.5 months on a bike DSNY kept saying didn’t meet the criteria. Both numbers are imperfect — naive over-counts repeat reports, dedup-by-address under-counts because the same rack hosts different bikes over the years - so I think the truth is somewhere in between.

What makes a bike “abandoned”?

The dominant outcome is the orange block: 37-44% of complaints close as “did not meet criteria.” The bike just isn’t broken enough by DSNY’s standards. Another 25-30% close as “no condition found” — which I think means DSNY showed up and the bike wasn’t there.

DSNY’s program runs under Local Law 55, and their definition of “unusable” requires two or more of these:

• Appears crushed or unusable
• Missing parts essential to operation (handlebars, pedals, rear wheel, chain)
• Damaged handlebars/pedals or bent forks, frames, or rims
• 50%+ rusted, including the chain locking it up

The bar for removal is surprisingly high. Missing a seat alone doesn’t count, maybe because some people remove their seats to prevent theft. There’s a reddit thread suggesting that ‘missing pedals’ are an unstated criteria for derelictness. Anecdotally, some folks have told me they’ve spent months going back and forth with DSNY on bikes missing wheels and handlebars and eventually gave up.

Notably DSNY will never remove ghost bikes placed as memorials — hell yeah <3

Data and code

I did this analysis using Claude, pulling the NYC 311 data via the Socrata API and made the charts. The 311 dataset was split in late 2025 into a 2010-2019 archive (76ig-c548) and a 2020-present live dataset (erm2-nwe9). The complaint type was renamed from “Derelict Bicycle” to “Abandoned Bike” in 2021, so query both:

$where=complaint_type IN ('Derelict Bicycle', 'Abandoned Bike')

Public data, no API key needed. Full script below (also on GitHub):

Thanks to Patrick Cleary, Zack Youngren, Paco, and Paul Schreiber via the TABK group chat for the discussion that made this way more interesting than just “here’s a chart.”