The Green Hummer's last ride coming soon!

(From the Frequently Asked Questions page)

When will the Green Hummer stop rolling?
We will continue to ride it around town until:

1. It breaks and no one feels like fixing it.

2. It is impounded, destroyed, or similar.

3. Our society as a whole comes to its senses.

The Green Hummer has one more ride to come. The Hummer has held up very well, consideing it’s been left outside its entire life, beat up twice, ridden more than a hundred miles, and is made out of a lot of junk. However, all good things must come to an end.

There’s two things happenning simultaneously. A sense of normalcy has fallen onto the Green Hummer. The crew once took it out every weekend, and surprised people wherever they went. But, the honeymoon has ended. The Green Hummer has been around Savannah so many times that it seems to have become normal. Can a city get used to a bike the size of an H2 rolling around on its downtown streets? Apparently so. And its crew can get a little bored, too.

A more pressing need for the Green Hummer’s recycling is the standard reason for most cyclists to cycle: there is now a lack of parking for the Green Hummer. The empty lot behind “Headquarters” is being developed into condos. More than half the off-street parking for the apartments is being built on, leading to a maintenance message hung on the Green Hummer’s pvc frame by the property management. The Green Hummer is taking up valuable space that could be better used for a real car. No vibrant city has enough parking, and the empty lot was simply a shortcut to KFC and a place to dump contraband and stolen luggage. The development of the empty lot is a good thing for the neighborhood. But this means that the Green Hummer has to find a new place to stay, or be disassembled. So, it’s time for disassembly.

There’s no recycling yet, though. The Green Hummer’s simply not going to fade away because of parking problems. It’s going to sit defiantly in the weeds behind the parking spots until Earth Day. Then, one more epic ride around Savannah.

The Green Hummer will leave Headquarters at 12:00 noon on Friday, April 22nd, and cruise down the bike lane out of familiar downtown and back to where the Hummer was born: Midtown and the Southside. Southside is Savannah’s area of shopping malls, big box stores, car dealerships and gas stations with cheap cigarettes. It’s always been a long-term goal to take the Hummer out there. Now there’s no time left for long-term.

But what happens after the Hummer is gone? Well, a lot of cycle activists in Savannah have found each other through the Green Hummer Project. There’s a good two dozen people in Savannah that now know a lot about building and riding large, weird bikes, as well as people’s responses to those weird bikes. They have experience dealing with police during the G8, with the public on the sidewalk, and with drivers on the street. There’s an understanding of how differently people act when behind tinted windows and computer screens. And there’s an understanding that if you break the barriers that keep adults afraid of strangers; if you bypass that tinted glass and plastic; if you make someone notice something, you might be able to communicate.

There’s going to be another cycling activism project in Savannah this spring. There’s some sketches, some ideas, there’s already been one meeting at Vinnie’s. It’ll be hard to top an H2-sized bicycle. But we just might.