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.
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.