Can you guess what’s in the photo?
No, it’s not a work of art or an optical illusion. It’s in fact a “bicycle graveyard” on the outskirts of Hangzhou, China.
The birds-eye photos show thousands of perfectly good bicycles abandoned on an empty field.
Strangely, the bikes were seized by police after a popular government bike-sharing program went off the rails.
The $24 million bike-sharing program was first launched in 2008 in the city of for Hangzhou, which has a population 9 million, to cut air pollution.
Locals were encouraged to leave the car at home and instead ride on the free bikes. They could leave the bicycles at any of the 3000 designated drop-off zones.
It was a huge success for the city, eliminating more 110,000 tonnes of air pollution, but it all went downhill when private businesses got involved and tried to introduce “dockless” bikes.
Bicycles no longer had to be returned to the drop off zones, instead the new “dockless” bikes could be chained up anywhere in the city.
Through an app, you could unchain the bike and use it when you needed.
However, this led to thousands of bikes chained up to anything and everything in the city.
In March, more than 23,000 bikes were seized by police due to complaints.
Now, those bikes sit in a field just outside the city to rust out the rest of their lives.