I got off the train a mile or two south of Downtown Atlanta and rode my bike down a busy street named for a Civil Rights icon. I then stood on line with black and brown men, some of whom had driven overflowing trucks and others who had pushed filled shopping carts there, and waited my turn to weigh my manual kick scooter, bungee-corded to the back of my bike, and get paid for it (a whopping fifty cents) to be sold as scrap metal.
The air thick with the stench of stale beer from the cans being crushed through a machine next to me, I wondered where the increasingly-prevalent shareable electric kick scooters, their lifespans apparently not much longer than a month, are being sent to be recycled, if they even are. After then talking with the owner of this forty-three-year-old business, I knew they weren’t coming here.
I then continued Traveling at the Speed of Bike — from Mechanicsville to Midtown, to do more hands-on research for the article I’ve been hired to write. Things are getting curiouser and curiouser . . .
Traveling at the Speed of Bike 