You Can’t Park There, Mate (11 Photos)

November 12, 2026

By Vidar

Nobody is moving these

Some vehicles get abandoned, some get stranded, and some are put up there on purpose by artists and museums. Either way, the parking attendant has given up.

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🚙 “Test the Best” — By Birgit Kinder at the East Side Gallery, Berlin, Germany 🇩🇪

Birgit Kinder painted a Trabant breaking straight through the Wall in 1990, one of the best-known images at the East Side Gallery.

💡 Title Fact: In 2009 Kinder renamed the painting “Test the Rest”, as a critique of how the City of Berlin was handling the East Side Gallery at the time.

📷 Photo: Jörg Fuhrmann (Intermerker) / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

🚲 Bike in the River — Maastricht, Netherlands 🇳🇱

The Dutch way of not finding a parking space. This one lies on the bed of the Meuse, slowly turning into a garden.

💡 Canal Fact: Amsterdam fishes an estimated 12,000 to 15,000 bikes out of its canals every year. The city’s water authority, Waternet, hauls them up with a claw on a barge-mounted crane, and it believes most of them were stolen or vandalized before they went in.

📷 Photo: Palauenc05 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

🚲 The Bike in the Tree — Vashon Island, Washington, USA 🇺🇸

Not parked so much as absorbed. An old child’s bicycle is embedded in a fir trunk in the woods off Vashon Highway on Vashon Island.

💡 Bike Fact: The bike belonged to Don Puz, who was given it as a boy after his family’s home burned down. He told the Vashon Beachcomber he was “too big a kid to ride it,” so in 1954 he left it in the woods while playing with friends and never went back for it. Berkeley Breathed, who grew up on the island, wrote his own version of the story as the picture book Red Ranger Came Calling.

📷 Photo and cover crop: rev.sherm / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

🚌 “Hang On A Minute Lads, I’ve Got A Great Idea…” — By Richard Wilson in Bexhill-on-Sea, UK 🇬🇧

In summer 2012 a full-size replica coach teetered over the roof edge of the De La Warr Pavilion, a straight quote from the cliffhanger ending of The Italian Job. It was hydraulically driven to teeter on the edge, so the gold-heist joke kept moving.

💡 Coach Fact: The artwork was made for the 2012 Cultural Olympiad and stayed up from July until October. Comedian Eddie Izzard, the Pavilion’s honorary patron, was its principal sponsor.

📷 Photo: Chris Sampson / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

🦈 The Headington Shark — By John Buckley in Oxford, UK 🇬🇧

On August 9, 1986, residents of New High Street woke up to a 7.6-meter (25-foot) fiberglass shark nose-diving into Bill Heine’s roof. Sculptor John Buckley made it; the council tried for years to get it taken down.

💡 Shark Fact: It went up on the 41st anniversary of the Nagasaki bombing, and Bill Heine said it stood for the anger and helplessness people felt about nuclear weapons.

📷 Photo and cover crop: Balon Greyjoy / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

✈️ The Jumbo on Stilts — Technik Museum Speyer, Germany 🇩🇪

Built in 1978 and once flown by Lufthansa, this Boeing 747 came to the Technik Museum Speyer in 2002. Getting there was half the show: the fuselage was floated up the Rhine on a pontoon before the jet was hoisted onto steel stilts.

💡 Visitor Fact: The jet is open inside, and visitors can explore even the cargo hold and climb out onto the left wing, about 20 meters (66 feet) up, according to the Technik Museum Speyer.

📷 Photo: Horst / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

🛥️ The Ship Graveyard — Moynaq, Uzbekistan 🇺🇿

Moynaq was Uzbekistan’s only port, a town that lived on industrial fishing and canning. Then Soviet irrigation projects diverted the rivers that fed the Aral Sea, the water retreated, and the fleet was left behind in the sand.

💡 Sea Fact: The shoreline is now around 150 km (93 miles) from town. Since 2018 the Stihia electronic music festival has been held on the town’s former seashore.

📷 Photo: upyernoz / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

🚲 The Bike on the Trestle — Washington, DC, USA 🇺🇸

And a second bike that stayed too long. Someone left it in the fork of a tree growing on an abutment of the old Foundry Branch Trestle in Georgetown, and the trunk has swallowed it up to the seat.

💡 Trestle Fact: Built in 1896, the bridge carried streetcars of the Washington and Great Falls Electric Railway from Georgetown toward Glen Echo. It is the last streetcar bridge left in DC, and it is due to be demolished; the concrete footings are to stay.

📷 Photo: G. Edward Johnson / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

🚢 The Eduard Bohlen — Conception Bay, Namibia 🇳🇦

The steamship ran aground in thick fog on September 5, 1909. Since then the desert has pushed the coastline out, and the wreck now sits in the sand roughly 400 meters from the water.

💡 Desert Fact: For a while the stranded ship served as a makeshift hotel for diamond miners working the coast. The mine manager got the captain’s quarters.

📷 Photo: Anagoria / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

🚗 “Quo Vadis” — By David Černý in Prague, Czech Republic 🇨🇿

In the fall of 1989 thousands of East Germans climbed into the West German Embassy garden in Prague to seek asylum, leaving their Trabants in the streets outside. David Černý gave one of those little cars legs.

💡 Trabi Fact: Černý’s original stood on Old Town Square in 1990 and is now in Leipzig; a bronze cast has stood in the embassy garden since 2001.

📷 Photo: VitVit / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

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✈️ Concorde and Tu-144 on the Roof — Sinsheim, Germany 🇩🇪

Speyer’s sister museum went one better: two supersonic airliners, climbing off the roof side by side. Concorde F-BVFB left Paris by road in July 2003 and was lifted onto the roof in March 2004. The Soviet Tu-144 next to it had an even longer trip: by ship from St. Petersburg to Rotterdam, then up the Rhine and the Neckar.

💡 Supersonic Fact: The museum calls the pairing a sight unique in the world, and you can walk through Concorde’s passenger cabin and look into the cockpit. This one made 5,473 flights for Air France, including a round-the-world trip in 1988 that took just over 38 hours.

📷 Photo: Dr. Thomas Liptak / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)