D-0003 There are no empty spaces in this bicycle lot

This was compiled from the handover notebook used by the attendant of the No. 2 bicycle lot at the east exit of Shiki Station, the management company’s inspection records, and interviews with users. The lot is subscription-based but has no assigned spaces; it is crowded enough that a waiting list forms, and each morning it packs until the handlebars tangle. The attendant’s job was to count the bicycles at six every morning and to untangle and straighten them. The first record is a single line in the notebook from October 2025: the two slots on either side of one bicycle in row B have been empty for three days running.

The attendant, while clearing the aisles, rearranged the surrounding bicycles into the empty slots. The next morning, the bicycles he had moved were back, one slot further out. When he asked, the users who had moved them reportedly gave no better answer than: no reason, it just looked hard to park there this morning. No one had conferred, and the empty space slowly widened. The attendant himself noticed, only afterward, that his own morning rounds had been skipping that one section; since then he writes his route in a pocket notebook and checks it every morning.

The owner of the bicycle at the center was a vocational school student who came back here after night shifts. He had noticed it too, though at first, it seems, he thought he was in luck — easy parking in a crowded lot. Every morning, in a full lot, his bicycle alone stood in the middle of the emptiness. He switched to the row on the opposite side, but within days the same shape of emptiness had formed around the new spot, as his messages to a friend record. He also wrote: kind of weird how it just keeps emptying out around me. Among the users, a way of putting it — better not to park there — had come to be understood, with no one knowing who had started it.

The student asked a friend, half as a joke, to try parking next to him. He wanted to see whether it would really empty out, he said afterward. The friend obliged for a few days. One morning, on the friend’s bicycle alone, a yellow removal-warning sticker was found. The management company answers that it issues no warning of that format. The friend has not used this lot since. The student’s messages that joked about the empty space end there.

In the winter, when the emptiness had grown to a full section, the management company set out cones in the name of section maintenance and removed the bicycle at the center as long-abandoned. The records disagree as to when the student had stopped coming. Even after the maintenance was finished, no one parks in that section. That the emptiness moved when he switched rows, and that since the removal it has not moved from the original slots, do not line up, however the records are set against each other. In the margin of the records, a reading has been added: that to notice, perhaps, is to join.

The waiting list for this lot still holds some forty names. The freed slots were offered from the top of the list in turn, but no one has signed. People went to look and simply went home; the reasons vary — it felt far from the station, it looked hard to get a bicycle in and out. The section is in the row closest to the station. The attendant still counts the bicycles at six every morning and untangles the ones that have locked together. On the last page of the handover notebook there is only this: that row does not need straightening. Who decided so is not written.