In my experience it's mostly a matter of not having the most desirable bike or the shittiest lock. Put a $100 u-lock on a $300 bike, and you can almost be assured that you'll have neither. Put a nice enough lock on yours, and you can be pretty sure you won't have the most easily stolen bike either.
At least in the US, road bikes are pretty much immune to being stolen because they're seen as terminally uncool by the lay population. Would I leave a $5000 road bike locked up at a subway station? Not likely, but I'm not fast enough to justify owning one anyways. $2000, yeah probably, as long as I'm not leaving it there daily.
Anecdotally, police won't do shit to recover a stolen bike in the US. Having some kind of tracker is only going to help you once it's already been stolen. I'd focus my efforts on preventing the theft in the first place.
In my experience it's mostly a matter of not having the most desirable bike or the shittiest lock.
Right, in The Netherlands, where there are a lot of bikes, this is the basic rule: just make sure that there are other bikes that are more attractive to steal, even if it's a new bike. The second basic rule is: use a chain lock to attach your bike frame to an unmovable object, so that a thief cannot just throw your bike in a van and remove the locks elsewhere.
What I do:
- Use a ring lock for the back wheel. Makes it unattractive to steal just the wheel. The lock needs to be unscrewed from the frame to remove the wheel.
- Use a chain lock and make it go through the frame, front wheel, and attach it to an unmovable object. In order to steal the frame, the thief would have to saw through the chain in plain sight.
- If there is no supervised parking, park the bike in an area where there are enough people where someone will notice a thief trying to break the locks.
- Get bike insurance. It's usually only 10 Euro per month and if your bike gets stolen, you get back the bike's value.
- Some insurers also install a tracker. This has double value: bikes with a tracker are less attractive to steal. Secondly, bikes with a tracker are usually moved to a 'cool-off' location first. This is usually just some place removed a few streets from where the bike was stolen. If it's still there after a few days, the thieves know that nobody is actively tracking the bike and they can take it somewhere to comfortably break the lock. So, it's likely that the insurer will find the bike at the cool-off location without much damage.
I wouldn't want to confront a potentially aggressive person with a saw in hand either. I might call the police, but I'd assume that by the time they got there, the thief would be gone, and that's if the police even cared enough to send someone.
I think this is mainly an enforcement issue. The police could easily track these people down if they were willing to put any energy into it.
> The police could easily track these people down if they were willing to put any energy into it.
That's a bit of a myopic view - in many of these cities, the DA will refuse to prosecute someone for thefts like this, so it does no good to arrest someone. Police in many cities are underfunded and understaffed, and if they're getting no support from the DA they have to prioritize.
This very much varies by location in the US. In the central areas of most major metros your bike WILL be stripped if locked up on the street and not attended/guarded. I live in one of the most bike friendly cities in the US, and I can't even lock up my bike outside of a bar/restaurant downtown without having to chase off aggro dudes trying to strip parts off it in the broad daylight. And I'm talking a dirt cheap commuter bike from bikesdirect.com. A $2k bike locked up downtown here would last 2 minutes. They use battery powered grinders, so how uber your lock is doesn't matter anymore either.
It's a really frustrating problem, and has changed the way I feel about this city a lot. Being able to just casually ride around with friends socializing in summer evenings was really great. Now it's everyone taking ubers.
My experience having recently had my road bike stolen would disagree. You're spot on about fancy bikes automatically being a target and the importance of your lock job being at a minimum more difficult to get through than the neighbor's. I now have a cheap single speed for my "around town" bike along with a heavy kryptonite ulock.
This is something I never understood.
Why so many bike theft? a regular new one is 3-4 hundred$ and cannot be sold that easily (Say vs electronic goods). Why theft is so popular?
I mean thief can steal one for their own purpose, but then what? He steal another one every weeks?
Steal the bike, sell it on craigslist/facebook marketplace/etc for $100, profit.
It can often take less that 5/10 minutes to steal a bike which is a pretty good RoR.
How could we stop it? Probably the best way would be stronger regulations on community marketplaces/pawn shops/ebay/etc. ATM, they don't GAF about selling stolen goods.
I also think the police just don't take it very seriously. Certainly that's the case here in SF. I've reported a number of stolen bikes over the years and my impression was of massive indifference. After bike number 7 was stolen, I just gave up. A few years later I'm thinking about buying a bike again, and risk of theft is my number one concern.
Well, not to defend the police, but after a bike is stolen I don't know what you could expect them to do.
Even if they had a dedicated bike recovery task force, the most they could do is visit local pawn shops and browse community marketplaces for a bike matching the description (assuming it wasn't broken down for parts).
Now, before a bike is stolen, I'd expect police to actually patrol places where bikes are being commonly stolen from (or for that matter, places where cars are commonly broken into). That part is something I do blame them for. The fact that SF is basically synonymous with "don't leave anything in the car" is an indictment on local police.
I think it would be great if they actually policed not just the pawn shops and sketchier bike shops, but also the people randomly selling them on the street and the back-alley bicycle chop shops, which are easily visible. Instead of the theft victims wandering the neighborhood trying to find their bike and get it back, which is what happens a lot here, I would like the police to take a swing at it.
But from the air of the police taking reports, absolutely nothing will happen. One time a cop asked me why I was bothering, did I need it for insurance or something? No, I told him, it was a crime and I figured that being police, they'd want to know. That seemed novel to him.
But I don't just want them to do something for me after my bicycle is stolen. I'd like them to be energetic enough in running down organized bike theft operations that those criminals find some other line of work. And a good way way to do that is taking individual bike thefts seriously.
Here in Toronto I (and a bunch of other people) witnessed a bike being stolen in broad daylight on a major street downtown.
Naturally we took videos and called the cops. Naturally the cops didn't show up (the store manager we left the videos and pictures with said they did show up like 7 hours later). In the subsequent 10 minutes the thief came back and stole two more bikes, while we continued to watch and video (and not physically intervene, because fighting a guy with a power tool is a really stupid idea).
If the cops showed up promptly at the very least they could have prevented two bikes from being stolen. There's a good chance they would have managed to arrest the thief too.
It also seems like a good candidate for sting operations. Put expensive bikes out with flimsy locks in places with high rates of theft and have undercover officers watch them. When they're stolen, either arrest the thieves immediately or follow them for awhile to figure out who they're working for.
Having a dumpy old bike helps. I have accidentally locked my cheap u-lock to the bike itself instead of the bike rack a few times at a train station and nobody took it. The worst thing that has ever happened is that someone stole my quick release skewer, so I have a screw on one now.
At least in the US, road bikes are pretty much immune to being stolen because they're seen as terminally uncool by the lay population. Would I leave a $5000 road bike locked up at a subway station? Not likely, but I'm not fast enough to justify owning one anyways. $2000, yeah probably, as long as I'm not leaving it there daily.
Anecdotally, police won't do shit to recover a stolen bike in the US. Having some kind of tracker is only going to help you once it's already been stolen. I'd focus my efforts on preventing the theft in the first place.