Each year in downtown Silver Spring, Maryland, the city funds the construction of a unique Christmas tree. This Christmas tree display is different every year. One year it was made out of umbrellas, another year it was made out of takeout food containers and pretend T-bone steaks, and a different year it was made out of musical instruments that the children could interact with.
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This year, in downtown Silver Spring, Maryland, the Christmas tree is made out of bicycles. Small bicycles big bicycles all kinds of bicycles lit up with LED lights. Also on the side of the Christmas tree are solar panels that that collect sunlight and power the lights of the tree. In addition, there are bicycles all around the base of the tree that people can ride to power other lights on the tree as well.
In downtown Silver Spring Maryland, there has been a recent surge of bike rental companies. There are at least three different types of bikes that you can rent out by the half hour. The bikes are either positioned on stationary racks, or even more recently, bikes are just found all over the place without a specific docking station, for these bikes, a lock on the rear wheel of the bike prevents anybody who hasn’t paid for a ride from taking the bike. One specific company, lime bike, allows you to pick up a bike wherever you find one, which is searchable from your smart phone, and drop it off wherever you feel like it. The bikes are either positioned on stationary racks, or even more recently, bikes are just found all over the place without a specific docking station, for these bikes, a lock on the rear wheel of the bike prevents anybody who hasn’t paid for a ride from taking the bike. One specific company, lime bike, allows you to pick up a bike wherever you find one, using the locating app searchable from your smart phone, and drop it off wherever you feel like it.
This is pretty attractive for commuters, because there is no docking station that you need to locate in order to leave your bike. Ranging from $.50 per ride to over a dollar per ride, these bikes are everywhere in the area and relatively affordable.
Here are some photos I took during a recent evening where we saw the tree for the first time. You can see the solar panels, the bicycles lit up all around the tree, as well as the bicycles around the base of the tree. The bikes on the base of the tree are the Capital Bikeshare brand of the rental bikes, one of the three companies that are doing this type of bike rental service in the area.
In my opinion, this is a pretty cool way to do a downtown Christmas tree display. It’s engaging for the community, pretty cool to look at, and promotes the idea of reducing car transportation in such a congested, traffic-prone area of the United States.
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