Somewhere in the last year or so I read an article arguing that the reason bike theft is so attractive is that although the reward (to the thief) of the crime is small, the risk is practically zero. The suggestion was that if the police managed to successfully investigate and prosecute even a small fraction of bike thefts, they could increase the risk to the thief by several orders of magnitude. Since the reward is so small, this could effectively deter at least casual theft.
There would probably still be professionals stealing expensive bikes, I suppose, but still, this seems worth trying.
$1k bikes are naturally pretty common targets for theft (as it's pretty easy to break a $100 lock. More expensive bikes generally doesn't mean better security, but it often means more demand to steal it).
At that price, I really wouldn't consider 100k to investigate, prosecute and sentence a very conservative guess. Seems a bit on the high end. Stealing a bike doesn't result in jail generally (expensive). The prosecution is usually quick and easy (tons of similar cases) and the penalty is usually a fine for first-time offenders.
What you also often see in crime is the 80/20 effect. For example here in Amsterdam they created a list of 500 people who often ran into trouble with the police and focused a lot of effort on them. As each and every one of them plans and executes on an elaborate theft say once a month, they're responsible for more than 10 of such cases every single day. The other thousands of people who commit a theft might do it incidentally, like once every few years or once in their life, and usually not something elaborate.
Same with bike theft, I think. I've actually seen big vans with a team of 3 operate at night. They'll throw 15 bikes that are locked but not attached into the van in the span of 5 minutes with the 3 of em, then drive off to some garage and spend the next 5 hours relaxed cutting through the locks in comfort with the right tools. They'll switch neighborhoods every now and then, and sell 20 at a time to struggling obscure bike shops that need a bigger profit than what they can get if they buy straight from the factory.
If you have 2-3 of such teams operate in your city and do two weekly runs that's easily a million bucks, that's, you can probably get rid of them for a few hundred thousand bucks and recuperate 100k from the thieves. But you prevent a million in theft and restore a bit of social order. Of course it's not just the theft, it's also the broken-window theory stuff. The notion of escalating crime, and of affluent people moving to other places if you let this + 50 other things like this slip, and you end up with dropping rents and an imbalance of disproportionate amounts of low-socioeconomic individuals living there. Bit of a slippery slope argument I know but it's not far from the truth.
The (somewhat controversial) idea is that if you go out of your way to punish smaller crimes, people don't do the bigger ones. It wasn't cost effective for police in NYC to stop the smaller crimes (people spraying water on your windshield and asking for a dollar to wipe it off) but larger crimes dropped with it.
If you view police as a fixed cost, then perhaps it is worthwhile.
That said, there are plenty of holes in the theory.
> Any bike thief worth his shim knows you’ve got to liquidate the rolling booty via parts
When I lived in New York in the mid-2000's it was pretty common to find folks trying to sell stolen bikes for $20 in public parks. Being younger with less sense and having lost a couple of bikes myself, I would sometimes get in their faces. That was a dumb idea, cf. the screwdriver anecdote in the article.
It was also an open secret that local restaurants bought stolen bikes for delivery workers and just covered them up in duct tape. I'm sure this doesn't explain 100% of bike thefts.
Maybe in Seattle chop shops are necessary, but in New York the problem seems so overwhelming that that just strikes me as a lot of unnecessary effort. The police generally could not care less.
My bike was stolen in London in 2009, the day before I went on holiday.
I found it on Gumtree (like Craigslist) the next day. I stuck the phone number in Google, and a load of other Gumtree adverts popped up -- "Call Dave" "Call Pete" "Call Andy". I sent this to the police. An officer phoned a few days later, and was really pleased and surprised at what I'd been able to do. She said she'd pass it on to the "intelligence team".
Heh, similar experience here. In fact I'm part of a facebook group for 2nd hand stuff, one dude always posts bikes for sale there, like 2-3 a week, but from like 50 different accounts. (hey it takes 1 minute and the bike sells for ~$100) Problem? He makes the pictures in his garden with a very particular fence I always recognize.
I wasn't quite sure if he was just a repair guy with a small business, someone buying cheap broken bikes and fixing them up, using FB as a sales channel, or a proper thief. Until one day I saw someone comment on one of his bikes on facebook saying he went to buy a bike and that the guy had an elaborate camera and a television screen to see if the police rang the bell or just a regular buyer as well as some other negative comments.
Police didn't seem to pick up the case though, he's still at it. But yeah I always put the phone number in google, if I get a load of different names I just move on. It doesn't happen that often, but when something is too good to be true it happens like 9/10 times.
i mean i get it, law enforcement have to prioritize their time just like everybody else.. and a stolen huffy is not going to trump the domestic violence call, or the hit and run.. but it still sucks.
come to think of it, stolen cars work effectively the same way. the only difference is they are tracked by so many other mechanisms (registration, plates, cameras, they are physically large enough to be difficult to hide). thieves suck.
In Copenhagen, Denmark where bike riding and bike theft is very common, the police does little about it. In fact it came out recently that the police have an unofficial policy of not investigating thefts of value less than 13.000 euros due to "lack of resources".
There is seldom story of say an angry man in a van running down two kids on a stolen scooter otherwise vigilante justice is very rare.
I think for most bike thiefs are just having field day (year or decade) and probably quite a bit more organized than in Seattle due to massive market for bikes and bike parts here in Copenhagen.
I don't think that stole danish bikes are sold in Denmark, not whole nor in parts. They are loaded on to truck and moved out of the country.
I believe that most Danes buy their bikes part in stores (physical or online), making the market for stolen part very small.
I understand that the police doesn't have resources to investigate every single bike theft, but perhaps if they looked at on a case by case basis and looked at the problem as a whole, then maybe the economy would be vastly different. If 100 bikes are stolen, they aren't being stolen by a 100 different people, more likely just a few people are responsible for the majority of those thefts. I worked at a company where the entire bike rack was stole at once, a truck backed up and the entire row of 30+ bikes was stolen. Because of how the system works the police will get 30 different cases of stole bike, each of which isn't worth looking into.
It's a bit different from the US, because Denmark is much much small, but if the Danish police said "The next 3 to 5 years we invest heavily in finding bikes and preventing bike theft" then you wouldn't need to do much after that, because the criminal would have moved to a different country.
I wonder to what extend the intensity of bike theft will incentivize bike users to buy and use bikes of low value. I have conflicting anecdotal experiences about this. I lived in Rotterdam, where bike theft is intense, but where people usually ride cheap bikes every day, and where you know you can buy a cheap bike to someone in the street, for a price as low a ten euros. Bikes are a cheap commodity in Rotterdam. In San Francisco, also a bike theft intensive city, people seem to be undeterred in riding expensive bikes, and the expected price is in the hundreds of dollars.
The difference might be that bikes sleep outside much more often in Rotterdam than in San Francisco.
As someone who doesn't have a car and is broke, investing in my bike makes a lot of sense - public transit costs 100/month[1], my transportation bike cost 800$ and my yearly cost to maintain it is 100$ (tires, tube, chain). Therefore, in the first year, I save money.
My bike is fast and convenient for getting around, which makes it a reasonable alternative to other transportation methods (it's faster than traveling by car within the city limits of Chicago).
In contrast, a ~100$ bike is much slower and more expensive to maintain. Suggesting only fools ride nice bikes is short sighted.
We need to make bike theft less profitable instead of telling everyone to ride shitty, impractical bikes.
The difference between an $800 bike and a $100 second hand one isn't really that big. You certainly can't call the other one a shitty, impractical bike, as I see hundreds of thousands of people around me ride on them just fine. From menial workers to bank managers, no joke, hell the bank manager in a suit riding a shitty rattling $50 is a common sight, as anyone here in Amsterdam! It's only shitty because it looks shitty and rattles, but it works fine, and for a little bit more money you get a quiet, nice functional bike. The whole 'slower' part is nonsense (to me) unless you're doing this for sport on some kind of a (semi) track. Amsterdam is great for cycling, but you have a stoplight every 200m and cars, people and bikes everywhere. It's not like you can really take advantage of speed, and within the speed limits I tend to zip past 95/100 people on my $100 bike. It's like saying one car goes 200 MpH and the other goes only 100 and saying the latter is much slower. It is, but who cares if you're driving in the city?
I'm just saying this as at times people seem to compare a $200 bike to $1500 bikes as if they're comparing a crappy $250 7 inch netbook to a Macbook Pro Retina. While in reality, it's more like comparing a $15k watch to a $50 watch, they function exactly the same, tell you the time extremely accurately, easily last years, but one is cool, scarce, luxurious, and the other functional.
I appreciate there's gonna be some difference between a $100 and a $800 bike, not saying there's none, just saying there's not that much.
In any case, I concur with the guy from Rotterdam. Bike theft is intense (for me with a decent lock it's about once a year). But my replacement cost is low. I usually spend about $100 on a bike yearly which includes all costs.
Beyond that though, we simply have a huge bike market with lots of competition here. And because everyone rides bikes, you don't have to culturally differentiate yourself with a special bike like in some places where you look like an idiot if you have a cheap bike. Here that's normal and fully accepted, like having $50 sneakers. And the great thing about a deep bike economy with relatively low-prices is cheapish insurance. It's only a few dollars per month to insure a bike worth hundreds of dollars. Percentage based it's actually not great, but you can get a really nice theft-risk-free bike including maintenance for about $15 a month in total. That's hard to beat with public transportation or a car. I wish more cities invested in their bike lanes, a bike economy is awesome. You know all those health studies about 30-60 minutes of activity per day? So many people get that on their daily routine to work, while saving a ton of cash and being environmentally conscious, while at the same time turning transportation into some kind of egalitarian phenomenon with everyone riding bikes on the same lanes, as opposed to everyone knowing poor people often take the bus, and everyone seeing the difference between who has a $1k shitty 2nd hand car and who has the $100k Tesla. I love the bike economy in this city.
Anyway, this post was written regarding the utility of a bike in a Dutch city that I'm familiar with, please let me know your side of the story in Chigago (what's the insurance costs like for your bike and what's the rate of theft, I'm most curious about)! It'll be completely different for people who race, people who buy a bike with a cultural statement about authentic craftsman bike history & culture or whatever, or people who live in cities where you can cycle straight for half a mile without making a turn or running in to a stoplight. In any of those cases an expensive bike makes a lot of sense.
or people who live in cities where you can cycle straight for half a mile without making a turn or running in to a stoplight
I think Amsterdam here is the exception rather than the rule - most other places I've cycled have bikes on the road with cars rather than segregated tracks. Then, a faster bike makes a lot of sense, both from a safety standpoint (being able to accelerate quickly can get you out of trouble sometimes) and because you can actually hit your higher top speed, to shorten your commute.
Obviously there are diminishing returns - going from a $150 bike to a $300 bike is a big upgrade, and going from a $300 bike to say a $1000 bike probably makes less of a difference. But certainly in London (and Seattle from my experience, and probably many places in the US) I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that a nice road bike can make a bigger difference.
For context, here are some of the roads I cycle down when I cycle to work:
Are lower income people in SF riding expensive bikes, or just the well-paid ones? If bike-riding is a rich person's thing in SF, then the average rider will have spare cash to throw at it, stores can focus on selling more expensive bikes, higher prices are normalised...etc.
It's mostly younger people ride bikes, but because of the availability of bike lanes and public bike racks, more and more people from all incomes are riding bikes.
Yes, I think you're right. In Rotterdam everyone ride bikes, regardless of their income. Whereas in SF, it seems more a young, relatively affluent thing.
I live in a college town and worked at the college for a time. My commuting bike is an ugly assemblage of recycled parts, but carefully maintained, a it rides like a dream.
So what is the solution to bikes getting stolen? It seems like we cannot really make locks that are cheap enough to manufacture to prevent thieves from stealing bikes/harvesting them for parts.
Do we put GPS trackers on all bikes? Can we enforce harsher punishment for bike thieves?
> Can we enforce harsher punishment for bike thieves?
Yes, you can, but you choose not to [1]. This is a drain on society beyond the mere cost of buying replacement bikes. Bike theft discourages (even prevents) people from riding bikes. It puts us back in our cars, and makes us more sedentary. People who have never even ridden a bike before and have $200 to buy one are discouraged from buying used bikes because of the risk of buying stolen property.
The net effect--the true cost--of doing nothing serious about bicycle theft is massive, and it is borne by everyone through higher health insurance premiums, if not directly through decreased personal well-being.
Bike theft ought to be dealt with just as harshly as breaking into a gym and stealing a stationary bike...perhaps as harshly as stealing a car. Its effects are just as deleterious.
[1] I say "you" as a US person living outside the US, in a place where good bicycles are routinely left unattended with cheap cable locks, and not stolen. Still, parts like lights and pumps do get stolen, and even this does discourage people from cycling.
I'm surprised that "stronger locks" is what folks resort to, instead of trying to address the underlying issue (be it through punishment or other means.) I live in a country (in Asia) where bikes are routinely left on the street and not stolen or burglarized, scooters are abound and also easily parked, and generally petty crimes are rare. Here I can also freely leave my phone on the table in a coffee shop and go about.
I sure as heck wouldn't do this back in SF, though -- the amount of petty crime the society is willing to put up with, is, again, surprising.
It seems like if there are people willing to pay for expensive locks, if there was some sort of secure enclosure installed in various parts of the city that could be rented out just like parking lots - this would help more than locks.
I agree. I also suspect we live near each other; you can contact me with this name using the Google stuff and maybe we can leave our smartphones on the table together sometime.
I think bait bikes are a good solution. Put out a few normal looking bikes with gps trackers in them, and have stiff fines for those who get caught. Making locks safe against an angle grinder isnt really feasible, but making someone think twice before even trying because it's a bait bike might work.
I used to wonder why people would often use a natural gas main as a locking point. Now I realize that it provides a decent defence against angle grinder attacks (or at least gets any thief some public safety or trumped-up terrorism charge).
Interestingly enough, intentionally setting a trap (even on your own property that you expect to be burglarized) has been ruled to be unlawful unless your life is in danger.
"The law has always placed a higher value upon human safety than upon mere rights in property."
Firstly, bait bikes are inevitably going to be cheap bikes. Thieves are more interested in expensive bikes - and if the expensive bikes are not only more profitable, but also safer to steal, then they're bound to step up their lock-picking and angle-grinding game.
Secondly, finding someone to organise this would be difficult. Any single organisation sufficiently large enough to do this would be bureaucratic enough to insist on the same make/model of bike (for the obvious homogeneity benefits), which would make them as obvious as an undercover Crown Vic. Conversely, any kind of grassroots or community effort would (by design) need to alert as many people as possible to the venture, including the bike thieves themselves - thus spoiling it before it even begins.
Finally, these things are chop-shopped almost the instant they get on-sold. Tearing a bike down can be done in a public park in 5 minutes flat with a pocket's worth of tools. The bike thieves can adapt a lot more easily than the sting operators.
Bait bikes of a make/model make sense in a sufficiently bureaucratic organisation because it makes purchasing, tooling and technician training a hell of lot easier. Police cars (Crown Victorias) are obvious for the benefit of a few chases/crashes, when police fleets could have been a bit more surreptitious. I don't see a large organisations doing any different in selecting a "perfect bike to steal".
I assumed cheap bikes because of Ainmats[1] ratio of 1 in 100 bikes being trap bikes. 1 in 100 in any reasonably-sized city means tens/hundreds of thousands of dollars of kit (including GPS), and anyone with that kind of scratch has someone trying to minimise expenditure. Or, why spring for a Trek Butterfly to catch a hungry junkie when a Huffy would net hundreds of the same?
You make it sound like bike thieves knowing about the bait bikes would be a bad thing, when in fact that's the point. You want thieves to know about it, and be scared that any bike they make try to steal is a bait bike. They definitely couldn't be the same model, but I don't think that's as difficult as you make it sound. Isn't there a pretty successful program in San francisco starting out?
> Routinely opened with a Bic pen jammed into the keyhole (from the article).
This one model of locks. That was fixed in 2004. The whole first paragraph is fluff. The author does not know how bikes are actually stolen. I had a nice bike and lived in NYC. I used the New York Fahgettaboudit Mini [1] and a small cheap chain for the front wheel. The Fahgettaboudit has anti-theft protection up to $4,500 in US. If you are going to leave your bike in public overnight you always risk having your bike stolen. The key is to have a good lock and don't have a bunch of expensive accessories that can be easily taken.
We've successfully recovered thousands of bikes (three in the past two days!). We've made it easy to id stolen bikes, and more difficult to sell stolen bikes - which makes ultimately bike theft less appealing.
GPS trackers are great - but unfortunately, they have yet to meet these vital requirements: easy to charge, difficult to remove, waterproof, cheap enough to put on everyone's bikes.
Ride bikes that aren't worth stealing. When I used to bike to the train station in suburban chicago, I used an old single-speed no-name coaster-brake bike bought at a garage sale for almost nothing. I locked it with a very simple cable and padlock and nobody ever bothered it.
That's just plain stupid and tad racist.
You'd be extremely surprised to learn that these are sold for £10 or £20 not far from when they've been stolen.
It is racist to imply bikes are stolen by Poles and probably also to say that a shitty bike not worth selling round the corner for £20 is worth hauling all the way to Poland.
No, of course. That's why he had to specify a country. :-)
Sometimes we're being racist even though it's not on purpose. Unfortunately we're all racist up to some extent; myself included.
// Unrelated fun fact after checking your profile (I was trying to get some context for the discussion): If I'm not mistaken you're a Brit living and working in Barcelona. I'm from Barcelona, but living and working in Britain :-D
I'm tempted to do something like that. One thing you should be wary of is not leaving anything that can be taken off easily. If they don't take the bike, they might steal your lights or something small instead. Make sure that easily removable items are not left on the bike.
Long term, I think it's infrastructure changes and a more engrained bike culture that allows people to bring their bike inside with them more often. (Of course, maybe we just bring the thieves indoors then, but I bet the reduction in ease and opportunity corresponds with a reduction in theft.)
I ride two bikes, one worth stealing that simply never gets locked up outside, and another that nobody would ever want nor would I miss. When I ride the former, I only ride to places that allow me to take my bike inside: Roomy coffee shops or offices with storage for bikes.
Harsh punishment seems ruled out by the stories of Charles Dickens. In a time when they'd hang or exile you for a loaf of bread, bread still got stolen. Theft is a crime resulting from the social context, and particularly from inequality.
Bit of a difference from harsh punishment not deterring theft of something you need to live vs. theft of something like a bike. When the punishments for stealing anything at all are as severe as hanging, exile, or losing a hand, do you really expect much else besides necessities to be stolen? I suppose you still might expect all sorts of things to be stolen if the chance of getting caught is nil, as it is with bikes -- you still need a strong enough probability of getting caught to back up whatever punishment is decreed, which is why bait bikes can be a helpful tool. I doubt better locks would work, I remembered this video from years ago on how even ridiculous methods of stealing a bike won't get much attention: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbklkFuFk-4 (And if they did, a thief can probably convince most people it's their own bike and they lost the key/combo -- I kind of suspect that possibility goes through the minds of onlookers anyway.)
This article is incorrect. Kryptonite U-Locks cannot be picked with a bic pen. That hasn't been the case since 2005. That was only a certain model, and once made public they fixed it and offered free replacements.
I follow two principles to avoid bike theft: 1. always lock both wheels and the frame up with a very thick U lock, and 2. ride a bike less expensive to replace than repair. I regularly find bikes at Goodwill, flea markets, etc that are not stolen but are dirt cheap ($50, $100, etc). Even found a banged up old bike (dead tires, bad derailleur/gears) laying in a gutter. May not be the best ride in the world but it gets you from point A to B and never gets stolen.
As for preventing theft in general, don't leave it locked up outside. That'd probably cut down on 90% of thefts. They could improve outside safety by building special wire mesh enclosures for bikes on bike racks, which would make it more difficult to steal, more obvious someone is stealing, and generally protect the bike from vandalism and the weather.
"... Fortunately for Rosa, the Darlings were also allegedly fencing electronics, allowing the owner of a stolen iPad to track his missing tablet to the same apartment via an iPhone app connected to his iPad’s GPS. ..."
Would be a nice hack to build something like this. How would you embed a device like this into into a frame & other parts?
Comments: "... Ryan Scheel: Might it make sense to put a GPS device in bikes encrypted with a private key that only your computer has access to? ..."
RFID inventory of parts unique to a bike?
Would be interesting if each (high value) part had a unique serial number unique to the bike. Small RFID devices for the frame, wheels, seat brakes registered to a unique frame? That way each part could be tied to a frame & identifiable to one bike.
If you are serious, the answer is to make the device a 1" tube that fits into the steer tube of most bicycles and can receive and transmit RF via the top cap (which would be plastic rather than the usual metal). Easy to conceal, near-universal fit (for bikes from the last 10+ years), sufficient space for a battery, radio, no visible parts. Charge using the tube as ground and the top cap bolt as hot.
The problem is, it will cost $150 or so, plus monthly cellular data fees (you can dial 911 for free, but the police will not do anything with this).
Wow, thanks for digging that up. It even costs $152 right now (converted from GBP). Apart from the fact that you seemingly have to remove it to charge, looks good.
If you use an M2M or data-only plan, your monthly costs would be around $20.00 a month, not including the server that receives the GPS data. The only problem is that the cops won't do anything even if you provide them with the GPS data.
that's a pretty good description & solves find the frame (or potentially the bike) but not the parts being stripped & re-sold.
Maybe that's good enough. The 2007 article posted by a reader (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8817800) mentions the sequence is: Sell complete bike on Craigslist & stripping down as the last resort moving the parts to chop shops. The high cost is another form of insurance especially for USD8K bikes.
> You can rip off a bike and trade it for a $50 bag of drugs pretty easily
> The components, meanwhile—the lights, seats, handlebars, derailleurs, and brakes that turn a frame into a ridable bike—can go for hundreds of dollars each on the black market
If the whole bike sells for $20, how can each component sell for "hundreds of dollars each"???
> her $8,300 Seven Mudhoney disappeared
I didn't know bikes that expensive even existed.
So maybe the parts that sell for "hundreds of dollars" come from $8k bikes, and bikes that sell for 20 bucks are the cheap ones; but the article isn't clear on this.
It seems that owners of $8k bikes should refrain from buying parts on the black market, and that they can afford the small overhead (but added security) of only buying from legitimate dealerships?
- - -
Regarding the problem of bikes steal, is it better or worse to have a system of public bikes that can be rented for cheap? Paris (and London, and many other cities) have a system of public bikes that are available everywhere and that are very cheap to rent; I know those bikes get stolen (or broken) sometimes but they cannot really be resold as you can't legitimately "own" one.
It would be interesting to compare the numbers of bike thefts for cities that have public bikes versus ones that don't.
The difference is between a junkie quickly selling a bike to get a fix as fast as possible, and splitting the bike into components and knowing the right people to buy them.
The junkie doesn't give a shit about tearing the bike down and getting the best price, he just wants to shoot up and will take whatever he can get.
An interesting local stat for Santa Cruz. According to the article, given Seattle has a population of about 650k, they are dealing with one bike stolen per 580 residents. During the last year, the reported bike thefts in Santa Cruz city was 404 and with a population of 65k, we are looking at one theft per 160 residents.
Wherever there is a drug trade and a high transient/drug user population, there will be issues with bike theft. Where I live it is bad
There would probably still be professionals stealing expensive bikes, I suppose, but still, this seems worth trying.