> That theory is hard to square with the dramatic rise over the past 10-20 years.
How so? That exactly lines up with the timeframe of the opioid crisis.
Anecdotally, a large fraction of the RVs I see in my neighborhood are surrounded by needle caps and bike parts. The odds of those being drug-free cycling afficionados seem slim to me.
This is something I wish I understood better too. Someone has to end up buying the parts for some reason other than drugs for it not to be a closed system. I read this article a while back:
It points out a shady bike shop and Craigslist sellers, but not much beyond that.
I wouldn't be entirely surprised if the economy doesn't function. Thieves sell bikes to others who think they'll be able to resell them or trade them for drugs, eventually find out they can't and trash them.
On the other hand, I've seen RVs with dozens of bike frames leaning against them. I assume they wouldn't work at that scale if it wasn't worth it.
Once, thieves stole an entire bike rack outside my apartment. Another time, a thief stripped my bike, leaving their old components disgorged on the spot.
In the 90s, my city offered distinctive and solid bicycles for anyone's use. Painted the same, ugly chartreuse; I wasn't the only one hoping local demand would plummet for cheap, dubiously acquired bicycles. It was willfully naive, but harmless to consider that maybe thieves stole bikes because they didn't have a bike of their own. So, the reliable background level of theft surely must drop if we simply devalued them as a commodity and instead demonstrated them as a spontaneously shared mechanism of public transportation. Because we imagined an underground economy of bicycles, where the bicycle was a scarce resource and also a mode of transportation, was like the horse to the plains Indians.
But it wasn't like that. However distinctive and labeled, the city free bike program bled inventory. Once, less than a year into the program, I was riding by a nice house with it's garage door open. It was packed with city bikes. Before the program, everyone who wanted their own bike already had one. And the few bad actors were gorging themselves on this public good. Police everywhere are notorious for deprioritizing stolen bikes. So, when a rumor spread that the police had accidentally stumbled upon a box van, en route to the West Coast, filled with bottom-tier, weather-beaten, ugly chartreuse rehabbed cruisers, no one was surprised. In the 80s, police in Miami found six freighters taking stolen bikes to Haiti.
How so? That exactly lines up with the timeframe of the opioid crisis.
Anecdotally, a large fraction of the RVs I see in my neighborhood are surrounded by needle caps and bike parts. The odds of those being drug-free cycling afficionados seem slim to me.