Leihfahrräder, Parke, dann schäm dich

Holiness on two wheels, nuisance on one sidewalk

On a wet strip of pavement near Leopoldplatz, bike-share riders spent Monday afternoon abandoning rental bicycles across doorways, curb cuts, and the skinny lane that lets a stroller pass without scraping a lamppost. They looked absurdly satisfied with themselves, as if sweating across the district had absolved them of physics, manners, and the common obligation not to sprawl their ideology over other people’s entrances.

Residents and shopkeepers said the problem is not cycling. It is the liturgy that arrives with it: the little climate sermon, the self-congratulation, the breathless righteousness from people who have never had to carry a crate of apples, a bag of bread, or a sleeping child past their own parked conscience. A man in a rain-darkened jacket leaned his rental against a bakery door, then explained that cars were “the real pollution,” which is a lovely sentence if you are not the one trying to open a business under it.

Inside the shop, Hasan, a Turkish baker who asked that only his first name be used because he is tired of being made into neighborhood scenery for other people’s moral theater, called the bikes “cheap moral furniture.”

“People ride in here like they are entering a monastery,” he said. “Then they leave the bike where my mother has to step around it with hot trays. Very green. Very elegant. Very annoying. They talk like saints and park like drunks.”

The district office said it had received complaints about obstructed entrances and cluttered sidewalks near bike-share docking zones, but added that enforcement depends on limited staff, limited will, and the ancient Berlin tradition of treating a public problem as a paperwork exercise with a sad face. A spokesperson said the borough supports “sustainable mobility” while expecting users to show “basic consideration,” which in bureaucratic language usually means: please stop using our shared sidewalk as a confessional for your personality disorder.

The real obscenity is how clean the class performance looks from a distance. The bike pilgrims arrive talking like a Lars von Trier screenplay crossed with a municipal climate brochure: all sacrifice, no shame, and not a single useful thought about the woman hauling groceries, the delivery rider lifting crates through the rain, or the grandfather trying to get into his building without playing obstacle course with somebody’s rented halo. Their morality is always erect, always visible, always slightly wet with self-regard; meanwhile everyone else gets to be the floor.

By early evening, several renters had moved the bikes after being asked. Others insisted the sidewalk was “shared space,” a phrase Berliners use the way con artists use ethics: with a straight face and sticky fingers. One cyclist, speaking on condition of anonymity because his employer in Mitte is “very into values” and would not appreciate the optics, said he had parked “only for a second” outside a café. The café owner said that second had lasted long enough to block the door, the menu, and most of her remaining interest in civilization.

The district said it would review parking markings around the worst spots this week. Until then, Wedding gets the usual civic bedtime story: be considerate, use the designated spaces, and if you must perform your righteousness in public, at least do it without laying your sanctimony across somebody’s threshold like a damp pair of underwear.