What Happens to Stolen Bicycles?

http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/30393216796/what-happens-to-stolen-bicycles

by rohin • 14 years ago

534 347 14 years ago

blog.priceonomics.com

midas• 14 years ago

I've heard rumors that lots of stolen bikes are exported on container ships leaving the US. The argument is that the shipping is basically free, since most ships are carrying large deliveries to the US and are empty on the return trip.

Does anyone know if this is fact or fiction?

lallysingh• 14 years ago

Not terribly hard to find out -- the bike generates its own power, and is run outside. A few bikes with GPS and call-home device (powered by the bike) would draw traces to their destinations pretty quickly.

mrclark411• 14 years ago

Would love for someone to do a long form sting. Install gps on 10 bikes and follow them as they get stolen and passed around.

pavel_lishin12• 14 years ago

A pair of low-res cameras - one pointing forward, and one pointing upward - would result in some fantastic shots as well. (Though there may be privacy and legal concerns.)

brlewis2• 14 years ago

From the article: it’s heartbreaking to find out someone stole your bike; bikers love their bikes

Sounds like your idea addresses a real need. I wonder why I haven't heard about this kind of thing already implemented?

Price maybe? http://www.gizmag.com/spybike-gps-tracker/22999/ says $153.58 plus a pay-as-you-go SIM card.

Also http://www.zoombak.com/products/service-plans/

I wonder what it would take to make it more economical.

Loopsnut• 14 years ago

These guys are doing that and making a tv show about it: http://www.tocatchabikethief.com/

mseebach2• 14 years ago

A bike doesn't generate it's own power. An in-hub generator is rather expensive and thus rare, so might serve as a hint to the sophisticated thieves to check the bike for the phone-home device.

sharkweek• 14 years ago

it's very common for the US to export scrap metal back to China (or any number of manufacturing countries)-- http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/13/business/china-s-need-for-...

tcdent• 14 years ago

When I was younger, I worked for a company that exported cardboard back to China.

webandy2• 14 years ago

I was at a Wal-Mart in Shenzhen China and noticed a lot of used bicycles. I couldn't explain why they stocked used bicycles. Could have nothing to do with what you're saying, or they could have been stolen bicycles from somewhere else. In the US, bicycles sold at retail stores like Wal-Mart are new. http://www.flickr.com/photos/andyatkinson/392577801/

monkeyfacebag• 14 years ago

The "risk" as described here seems to account for only single incidences of bicycle theft. Seems like the more professional the bike thief, the larger the inventory of stolen bikes, thus the greater the penalty for being caught. Given that the value of stolen bikes on the market is relatively low, this might explain why there is no bike thief kingpin: at a certain point the risk exceeds the reward.

As an aside: I am surprised that the risk to kidnappers is considered higher than the risk to bank robbers. Can anyone explain this?

simonsarris• 14 years ago

> I am surprised that the risk to kidnappers is considered higher than the risk to bank robbers. Can anyone explain this?

Kidnapping, if you're holding out for ransom, is like playing a game of hot potato but you have to wait for your opponent's go-ahead before you can toss it.

Kidnapping (if you're looking for a random) is about aquiring something you don't want and nobody wants you to have so that you can make a risky deal that exposes you. You run the risk of being set up, and even if the deal is done successfully I'd imagine you'd run the risk of revenge, especially with any target worth a large value.

wisty2• 14 years ago

It's also a more violent crime, and one which gets more police attention. As long as you have a hostage, the police will hunt you like it's a murder case, but with more urgency.

citricsquid2• 14 years ago

The article links to a story about Igor Kenk, he stole almost 3,000 bicycles. He was caught, sentenced to 30 months and served 16. That's a few hours per bike, I think.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igor_Kenk

This isn't an American thing apparently, it seems stealing a bike anywhere in the world has absolutely no real risk, even if you still 3,000...

pavel_lishin12• 14 years ago

Sixteen months in jail is a pretty big risk, even if it is only a few hours per bike. On the other hand, 22 of the charges were apparently drug-related.

I wonder what his dollars-per-hour-in-jail ratio was.

defen• 14 years ago

Kidnapping is a capital crime in some jurisdictions.

slurgfest• 14 years ago

If the price of bikes hadn't gone through the roof within the last 20 years there wouldn't be so much incentive to steal them. As it is you can hardly buy a new bike for less than $800 at most shops.

Even if I could attach a weatherproofed Macbook to a pole with a U-lock, it would still be really unwise to do so. This is a pitiful commentary on our society and law enforcement

lambda• 14 years ago

Really? I just went to a shop to look at bikes (and a real bike shop, not Wal-Mart), and there were options in the $300-$400 range. At Wal-Mart and Target and the like, you can get bikes in the $100-$200 range (or really crappy ones for even cheaper).

blacksmith_tb• 14 years ago

Hmm, as a dedicated bike commuter I am almost inclined to agree, but I can't really get that excited about property crimes when rates of violent crime have been decreasing.

phishphood• 14 years ago

That's not true. I bought a brand new Schwinn at Walmart for $140 after taxes. Its not a very good bike but its good for what I bought it for, i.e. trips to coffee shop without worrying for it to be stolen. My other bike is a $2.5k Specialized Tarmac which I don't use casually

donpdonp• 14 years ago

It would help if every purchaser of a bicycle checked the frame serial number against various online stolen bike databases. I'm not sure how fragmented the bike registration industry is.

pavel_lishin12• 14 years ago

I think most purchasers don't care, at least not for any bike that cost less than $100.

jiggy20113• 14 years ago

I wonder how many people record their frame numbers, or even know that they exist?

I have 3 bikes and haven't got the frame numbers written down anywhere. Although I will rectify this now!

akgerber3• 14 years ago

Quite fragmented, especially considering nearly every local police department has their own.

dmm5• 14 years ago

Cities should levy a bike tax and use it to fund some snipers that shoot assholes who steal bikes.

tripa• 14 years ago

How would the sniper be supposed to distinguish the robber from the owner?

dmm5• 14 years ago

The thief is using a battery powered angle grinder to remove the u-lock. The owner uses a key. The snipers will be well trained to distinguish between the two.

Hmm. Maybe this would be a good application of unmanned drones?

pilsetnieks• 14 years ago

Although I believe that summary executions are in bad taste, I want to point out that, au contraire, the tax should be levied on car owners (to encourage cycling).

ketralnis2• 14 years ago

Not everyone can choose to bike instead of drive. When my driving commute was an hour longer than it is now, such a tax would not have encouraged me to cycle instead.

stephencanon• 14 years ago

You could just tranquilize them and then release them into the wild.

qq662• 14 years ago

These guys did that -- set up a bait bike and paintballed the guy. I don't condone vigilantism but here is the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xi6XtthI2F0

cpeterso2• 14 years ago

That video is totally fake and a great way to get shot by real guns.

sixQuarks• 14 years ago

Does anyone actually use priceonomics.com? I'm sorry, but I don't find the service useful at all. They come up with viral blog posts all the time, but the service is not actually something that I would use.

daveman2• 14 years ago

When I was looking to buy an Aeron chair, I used it to learn the range of market prices, and even was able to negotiate the seller down with the information from the site. I wouldn't have been able to get such a comprehensive view (in any reasonable amount of time) by just reading through CL. So yes it has been pretty useful to me.

mongonuts• 14 years ago

"Open Letter to the Guy Who Stole My Bike Wheel" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m68-oWBh9Ow

brucehart• 14 years ago

This is an area where a disruptive technology is due. Imagine if even 10% of bikes had technology that wirelessly sends out GPS coordinates or can identify the owner via an embedded RFID tag. Suddenly stealing bikes is not nearly as risk free and the incentive to participate is greatly reduced.

ryanwanger• 14 years ago

...assuming that thieves will actually be punished.

brlewis2• 14 years ago

See lallysingh's comment on this same article: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4444843

jjara• 14 years ago

Yes! Or a bar code/serial number encrusted in bikes' structure would do. Only this requires efforts from bike brands, owner, or shops to obtain a sustainable back-end tracking infrastructure.

degenerate• 14 years ago

Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:blog.pr...

webandy2• 14 years ago

The best workaround I know of for bike commuting is bike share programs. (US examples: "Nice Ride" in Minneapolis or "Capital Bikeshare" in DC). In these examples, the bikes are large, relatively unattractive, limited functionality (3 speeds), have distinctive designs, and these things to me I'm hoping remove the incentive to steal the bike.

claytonp• 14 years ago

What about bike parts? Bike seats, wheels, etc get stolen all the time. Are they just scrapping these parts out for 5 to 10 cents on the dollar as well?

andrewtbham• 14 years ago

My experience has been most bike thieves are kids. It's a training in a way for car thieves. They chop the bikes up, and paint them, then ride or sell them. bikes are a valuable commodity in bad neighborhoods cuz lots of people can't afford cars and public transportation might not take them where they need to go.

markbnine• 14 years ago

If Goldman Sachs didn’t have more profitable market inefficencies to exploit, they might be out there arbitraging stolen bikes.

Funny how no explanation is needed for this line. Goldman Sachs (and hence, Wall Street) is now the poster child for risk-free crime.

kcl• 14 years ago

It's a curious line, and while when I read it I let it pass with conditional assent, I now think it's incorrect.

Wall Street has poorer-than-usual ethics, and does commit crimes for profit, but in general it is wary of the legal system. Wall Street tends not to exploit opportunities that run afoul of the legal system, even when they are risk-adjusted comparable to other opportunities. They would rather make money legally than illegally, if they can help it.

To use the wording of the article, Goldman Sachs (Wall Street) typically does not commit crimes when "the potential revenue from the crime [is] greater than the probability adjusted weight of getting caught", even if you set the adjusted revenue to average profitability.

In particular, Goldman Sachs (Wall Street) is gunshy with respect to the US legal system. From a charitable standpoint, perhaps this is out of an ethical respect for the law. From a cynical standpoint, perhaps there is another more involved risk calculation which takes into account long-term reputation and the unpredictability of political administrations and legal settlements. Given a long enough outlook cynical self-interest approaches ethics.

akkartik• 14 years ago

The point of grandparent was precisely that you let it pass on a first reading. It doesn't matter whether it's true, it's a huge image shift.

laserDinosaur• 14 years ago

I've always wanted to buy a cheap bike and create a quick release bolt on the rear wheel that unspools as the wheel turns. I figure the culprit could get 3 or 4 revolutions before the back wheel falls off. Or maybe attach a length of wire to the front brake cable that wraps around the rear axel. Suddenly the wire snaps tight and yanks the front brakes. I figure it would make a good youtube series. My main fear is being stabbed to death by an angry bike thief...

mynameishere• 14 years ago

Booby traps are usually illegal.

jlgreco4• 14 years ago

Would that really be a booby trap though? Both sound more like (funny) anti-theft devices, since neither are intended to maim.

brendn• 14 years ago

Being stabbed to death would be a less painful and drawn-out alternative to being sued for the thief's medical bills.

fosap2• 14 years ago

European here. I thought the thief would now(after obamacare) have insurance?

alanfalcon• 14 years ago

This brings to mind Alan Turing's bicycle in Cryptonomicon:

  "So Turing can leave his bicycle anywhere and be confident that, if stolen, it won’t go more than a fifth of a kilometer before the chain falls off."

The whole passage (it relates eventually to Enigma and Cipher Text) is a good read: http://www.euskalnet.net/larraorma/crypto/slide18.html

Of course, the whole book is a good read, so skip the link and head to a bookstore.

samstave• 14 years ago

Any pics of this mechanism?

elmuchoprez• 14 years ago

My guess is that the pros are throwing them into a van or pick-up rather than riding away on the bike.

karpathy• 14 years ago

One of the links hidden away in the article is actually quite amusing: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/13/opinion/bike-thief.html?_r... It is a video if a guy stealing a bike a few times with saw/crowbar etc. (Except it's actually a hidden camera setup and it's his bike. Spoiler alert: Many people walk by, noone cares)

sageikosa• 14 years ago

The major deterrent in long public illegal operations is not the fear of a bystander taking action, but in the soon-to-be injured party (or a compatriot of such) taking notice.

Someone trying to get into a car could have just accidentally locked his keys in. Someone trying to get into my car has nefarious intent.

Jun8• 14 years ago

I think a useful tactic to curb loss of expensive bikes would be to legally target the people who buy them, these are the people that cause the market to exist and perpetuate the situation. My guess is that most of these people are not crooks, i.e. they are just young people who want to but can't afford a nice bike and they know exactly what they are buying. I don't understand anything about bikes so can't give an example there, but if a person would approach me to sell, say, a 2010 Prius for $5K, I just know that is a stolen car. If knowingly buying a stolen car carries even a small legal charge, most people wouldn't do it.

Tangentially, and pardon my ignorance, I'm not a biker: I can't understand people who shell out thousands of dollars for a bike, are these so much better than a $500 one?

jiggy20113• 14 years ago

That's assuming that they are selling the bikes at a far lower price than the market rate. Wise crooks probably know to offer a realistic price.

The prices for second hand bicycles are all over the place anyway. There's a significant number of people who will buy a reasonably expensive bike and keep it in the shed for years and then by the time they decide to get rid of it they have no idea what it's worth so will just sell it for below it's value.

enraged_camel2• 14 years ago

How can you tell if a bike you are buying is stolen? It would be pretty easy for a bike thief to post an ad on Craigslist saying they are selling their used bike.

>>Tangentially, and pardon my ignorance, I'm not a biker: I can't understand people who shell out thousands of dollars for a bike, are these so much better than a $500 one?

It makes a huge difference. More expensive bikes are built from lighter and stronger materials (such as carbon fiber), are more aerodynamic and have better balance. Just to name a few of the benefits.

Retric4• 14 years ago

I would argue it's often more about falling into the same trap as 'audiophiles' as it is about direct benefits. Few people notice the added weight from drinking 2lb of water but people spend hundreds of dollars shaving 1/10th of that from their bike.

zurn8• 14 years ago

> More expensive bikes are built from lighter and stronger materials (such as carbon fiber)

I would recommend anyone thinking carbon fiber makes stronger bikes to visit a topical image blog at http://www.bustedcarbon.com/ :)

The weight issue is addressed elsewhere in comments...

colinshark• 14 years ago

The difference between a nice "adult" bike and a cheap department store bike is night and day.

The expensive bike won't rust. The expensive bike can be repaired when things break. The expensive bike is half the weight.

If you are using your bike frequently, it's better in the long run to have decent hardware.

zurn8• 14 years ago

Sure, the department store bikes are garbage, but you can get a perfectly good brand name basic city bike for well under $1000.

Bikes mass is marginal compared to your body weight especially if you're average weight. A basic bike is 34 lbs and you are 175 lbs. And the weight only makes a big difference when climbing hills.

You're much better off losing a few pounds of fat than spending a few grand to get 10 lbs off the bike and shaving 2% off the required muscle power per mile :)

seanalltogether• 14 years ago

How do you charge someone with knowingly buying a stolen product in a legal system where someone can plead the 5th? How do you prove they knew?

Typically legal systems don't go after end consumers of stolen or counterfeit products, they go after suppliers, because they can prove that suppliers are actively breaking the law.

furyg3• 14 years ago

Knowingly purchasing stolen goods is already illegal in most places. The key is the "knowingly" part.

You would have to have a ubiquitous BikeID system in a central registry of stolen bikes. It would have to be incredibly easy to check the status of a BikeID (web/email/phone/sms). It would have to have incredible traction.

At that point if someone bought a bike which was tagged in the system as stolen, and didn't check/report it within 48 hours, they could be considered complicit in the theft.

We're getting pretty close to this with cars. I'm pretty libertarian in my ideology, but at some point the barrier is so low to running a CarFax-esque check that even I wouldn't mind penalizing buyers who don't do due diligence. It is, of course, easier to justify with higher ticket items than with bikes or phones...

wiredfool3• 14 years ago

Yep. It's like the difference between a netbook and a MBP. Can you get work done on both? Yep. Is it Easier/Better/Faster on the MBP? Yep.

The question is, if you see a couple year old Trek on ebay for ~800, with some mix of 105 and Bontrager parts, is it stolen or is it a good deal?

fffggg• 14 years ago

"I just know that is a stolen car"

Which is why criminals do not charge half of its used value -- they charge 100% of the used value just like everyone else.

You cannot tell a stolen bike on craigslist apart from a non-stolen bike based on the price alone.

The problem of stolen cars is addressed through licensing and registration. Not to mention, bicycles do not have a reliable and standardized VIN system like cars do. The fact is, the hassle of creating and enforcing such a system probably outweighs the positive aspects of preventing bike crime.

TallGuyShort• 14 years ago

I lived in a town that required all bikes to be registered and licensed, and all sales of bikes to go through the local government. It was such a big pain that I would rather just live with the higher risk of theft and the lack of enforcement.

qq662• 14 years ago

More often they charge 75-90% of its used value, enough of a discount to move it quickly but high enough of a price to avoid looking "too good to be true."

kisielk3• 14 years ago

Not sure if it applies to all of Japan or just the city where I lived, but there was a requirement to license and register your bike with the local police department. Despite that my bike still got stolen from my apartment building, and from what I heard from others bike theft was not uncommon.

lamby• 14 years ago

> I can't understand people who shell out thousands of dollars for a bike, are these so much better than a $500 one

They are significantly and astonishingly better if you do something that style of bike is designed to do - eg. ride 40km as efficiently as possible, go up mountains all day, sprint finishes, etc.

They aren't 10 times better, but that's not how subjective value works.

zurn8• 14 years ago

> I can't understand people who shell out thousands of dollars for a bike, are these so much better than a $500 one?

Sure, if you want a MTB for blazing offroad trails or a road bike for touring. For your regular 20 minute commute, a sub-$1000 city bike is pretty much the sweet spot (depending on your available disposable income of course).

herval2• 14 years ago

> Tangentially, and pardon my ignorance, I'm not a biker: I can't understand people who shell out thousands of dollars for a bike, are these so much better than a $500 one?

Yes, they're considerably better - the price is directly reflected on aspects such as durability and weight of the components (frame, gearing, wheels, etc). Keep in mind, though, that buying the most expensive bike around just to commute 10-20 miles to work won't be a good investment - you should go for a good quality one when you're serious about long distance training or hard core mountain biking, for instance (usually after you're already practicing whichever style you prefer - a lot of people invest in an expensive bike upfront and never really use it to its full capacity).

(or assemble your own. It's fun, specially for hackers/geeks!)

dbecker• 14 years ago

>Tangentially, and pardon my ignorance, I'm not a biker: I can't >understand people who shell out thousands of dollars for a bike, >are these so much better than a $500 one?

They are better. They aren't 5x better (as if this was even quantifiable)... but if you are passionate about biking and you spend a lot of time on your bike, it can seem worth it.

I spend much more time on my bike than in my car... and I appreciate the improved ride of associated with an extra $1000 on a bike more than I'd appreciate the improvements from spending an extra $5000 on a car. So, it certainly seems reasonable to me.

juan_juarez• 14 years ago

> Tangentially, and pardon my ignorance, I'm not a biker: I can't understand people who shell out thousands of dollars for a bike, are these so much better than a $500 one?

Think about one thing you're passionate about. There's going to be products that are good enough for the casual, every-day user and there's going to be premium goods, even if there's a decreasing price/performance ratio. Since we're on HN, I feel safe talking about computers.

Compare the $1000 3.9GHz i7 from Intel and the $500 3.8GHz version. Do some people need the minor performance increase enough to pay for it? Sure. Enough to create a market? Nope. It's people wanting to buy things just to show they can pay for it.

ericd• 14 years ago

Well, given the amount I will use that computer over the 2 years I have it and the disruption to flow that processing pauses cause, a ~10% increase in performance might be worth the premium. I imagine there's similar logic for bikes. But you're right, sometimes people just want to show off.

nl6• 14 years ago

Tangentially, and pardon my ignorance, I'm not a biker: I can't understand people who shell out thousands of dollars for a bike, are these so much better than a $500 one?

As many other answers say, yes, there is a difference.

Here are some details (for 'racing' road bikes, which I know best):

For around $400, if you buy well online you can get something with an aluminium frame, carbon fibre fork and moderately decent components (eg [1]). It'll probably weigh a bit under 30 pounds (13 kg).

For around $700 you'll get a bike with similar specs from a major manufacturer and you can get it from a bike shop, where they will assemble it for you, make sure you get the right size etc. See [2][3]

For around $1000 you can get a carbon fibre frame on your bike (online, with terrible components[4]) or bikes from major manufactures where the components start getting better (eg Shimano Sora 9 speed). These bikes should be between 20 and 25 pounds. See [5]

At $1500 you get bikes from major manufactures that are suitable for racing (ie, Shimano 105 10 speed, eg [6]), or can get pretty good carbon fiber bikes online. You also start getting decent bikes from high end manufactures (Bianchi, Pinarello, BMC). Most of these bikes will weigh a bit more than 20 pounds (9 kg), but if you choose carefully you might get under that.

Over $2000 you get carbon frames and Shimano's second to top component set, better wheels, and began getting under 20 pounds more often. High end only manufactures (Cervello, Ridley etc) are making their base level bikes.

Around $5000 you start getting electronic shifting, or better aero frames, deep rims on your wheels. You can start considering custom made frames. Your bike should weigh well under 20 pounds, and you can probably get down to the UCI limit of 6kg.

At $10,000 you are getting bike similar to what they ride in the Tour de France. You can get a power meter built into your crankset or wheels. The carbon frameset has been wind tunnel tested and is engineered so carefully that some parts of your frame only have a single layer of carbon, yet you still can't flex the frame at the bottom bracket. You probably have to add things like the power meter as ballast to make sure you are over the UCU weight limit. You can consider custom titanium[7] or trying to buy onto the speedvagen waiting list[8].

Over $10,000: McLaren + Specalized: http://www.bikerumor.com/2011/03/17/specialized-mclaren-veng... (actually, to be fair there are plenty of ways to spend $10K+ on a road bike. This is just one).

[1] http://www.bikesdirect.com/products/windsor/wellington3_IX.h...

[2] http://www.giant-bicycles.com/en-us/bikes/model/defy.5/9014/...

[3] http://www.trekbikes.com/us/en/bikes/road/sport/1_series/

[4] http://www.bikesdirect.com/products/fuji/fuji_sl3.htm

[5] http://www.specialized.com/us/en/bikes/road/allez/allezsport...

[6] http://www.trekbikes.com/us/en/bikes/road/sport/madone_2_ser...

[7] http://www.baumcycles.com/bikes/romano

[8] http://www.adecadentexistence.com/?p=469

jseliger2• 14 years ago

Or, if you're me, you're often carrying 20 pounds of stuff in a backpack on your back anyway, which probably obviates the 5 pound difference in bike weight. I'm riding a Big Buzz: http://www.rei.com/product/775488/novara-big-buzz-bike , which is apparently "sold out" right now, and it seems to work tolerable well. I've ridden friends' expensive bikes, and most of them don't seem to be worth it unless you're racing or riding a LOT of miles.

eru4• 14 years ago

But if you want to ride fast, why buy an upright bike at all? (Unless you want to compete in races that require it.)

sliverstorm3• 14 years ago

I'm torn over policies of targeting buyers of stolen goods. It's easy to think everyone buying stolen goods knows exactly what they are getting into.

Yet, not too long ago, I purchased a vehicle for a wholly reasonable price. I got the original pink slip. I got the keys. There were absolutely no signs of breaking & entering. Yet, I take it to the DMV to get registered, and what do you know- it's stolen property.

I lost my shirt on that deal, and it would have made it a million times worse if I was suddenly facing criminal charges.

Seriously, I hadn't even the slightest clue it was stolen- that is, until the police entered the DMV, looking straight at me. At that point there was only one thing that could be happening.

ricardobeat• 14 years ago

Shouldn't you have checked the car's plate and registration at the DMV before buying? That's standard procedure here.

hatcravat3• 14 years ago

The problem is many bikes are legitimately sold for well below MSRP. When a bicycle manufacturer sponsors a college team, they typically sell just-released models to team members for less than wholesale. The members will sell the bike the following year (when the frame is still considered a current model year) for the same as they paid and buy another new one.

nsns• 14 years ago

And of course: the stolen goods are also your means of escape; an added advantage.

derda• 14 years ago

I dont know if its common in the anywhere else but in my town here in germany the stealing of bike-PARTS has become very popular. I guess the owners of high-value bikes use better locks, that are actually hard to break ( like those: http://ebay.muskelkater-sport.de/fahrrad/schloesser/bordo-gr... ). But for Parts the risk is even lower and a good break or light system can yield a few bucks.

I personally use a cheap ( 50€ ) used bike as a daily driver, in combination with a 30€ lock, there will mostly be an easier/better target for the thief and if it ever gets stolen, its just 50 (80) bucks and not 1000€.

pyoung2• 14 years ago

Yup, very popular here in SF. I recently just got my wheels stolen. Also had a few seats stolen as well. Stealing parts is probably more common than stealing entire bikes. And if you look at the pictures of the stolen bikes linked in the article, most of them are missing a front wheel, which to me, implies that the thieves were targeting bikes that were only locked by their front wheel (or they were selling the front wheels of the bikes, as those are pretty common theft targets as well).

BenOfTomorrow• 14 years ago

Yup; recently had my REAR wheel stolen (a large pain to replace tire, tube, wheel, AND cassette). Now I lock both of them.

rodolphoarruda• 14 years ago

You are retro feeding the system when you buy an stolen item, even in good faith not knowing it has been stolen. A possible way out is to check the serial number of the frame. Most modern bikes have a serial number engraved in the bottom bracket. Before buying a second hand bike, check the serial number online, just Google it. See if the previous (sad) owner had posted a notice on the incident somewhere: blog, dedicated site to stolen bikes[1] etc. If you happen to find confirmation, you know what to do.

[1] http://www.bicicletasroubadas.com.br (Portuguese)

elliottcarlson3• 14 years ago

There is a bike seller in Manhattan who uses an interesting system in reselling his (more than likely) stolen bikes.

Once a buyer contacts him via craigslist, he finds out the persons general vicinity, brings the bike to the area and locks it up with a combo lock based chain. He will give you the address of the bike, and if you like it, can make the purchase online and you receive the combination. If you don't want it, he can pick it up who knows when - or leave it for someone else to check out. If the bike gets stolen, he hasn't lost anything on his bottom line and at no point is he in physical communication with the actual purchaser.

simba-hiiipower2• 14 years ago

interesting; i’d say that's pretty damn brilliant.

then again, if the risk of being caught (and punished) is as low in NY as it appears to be in SF, that seems like a bit of an overkill; wonder what the scale of his organization is..?

elliottcarlson3• 14 years ago

This same concept was debated within the realm of drug trade - which obviously is at a different risk level. With special compartment style locks on a chain, the same concept is possible - without a dealer having to ever interact directly with the buyer. Same concept can also exist for hiding information (whistle blowers hiding a SD card with data, a key, who knows what).

I don't know about SF, but it is not uncommon to see just a bike chain hanging on a post - it just fits in to the environment and no one will notice someone just walking up and taking their chain with the right combination.

peacemaker• 14 years ago

I'd say a more enterprising bike thief could really take advantage of this guy. Multiple email addresses to contact seller, regularly arrange viewings of these bikes and just steal them, probably using the same sort of equipment the seller uses to 'acquire' the bike originally!

roguecoder3• 14 years ago

If the risk of theft weren't so high that would be a pretty cool way to do a zipcar-style bike service.

andyakb• 14 years ago

boston has a zipcar bike system [better than zipcar because the bikes can be returned at any designated drop off/pickup location] called "hubway" but it is heavily subsidized [maybe entirely, im not sure]

kevinalexbrown• 14 years ago

It makes sense that large-scale operations are common in locations with a big bike scene. These will likely require a distribution network, so fighting bike theft might benefit from focusing on infiltrating those networks.

I had a friend who bought a bike lock that was insured against any thefts (whether they were quick with the insurance, I don't know). When he went to register it, he saw that there were two exceptions, one of which was the city in which he lived: Eugene Oregon, a town with tens of thousands of students. After asking around, he was told bike thieves there loaded entire bike racks onto trucks in a couple minutes, then removed each lock at their leisure in a storage facility.

I find it hard to imagine that they sold them off individually: it's too suspicious to have a few people selling hundreds of bikes. Likewise, delegating to underlings to sell the bikes also seems too risky, as several people now know about the enterprise. I suppose they sell wholesale to used bike shops in other towns who are in the know.

The solution in this case would seem to be turning criminals into witnesses, a la drug enforcement. Enforcement on an individual-basis wouldn't work: mere possession of a single stolen bicycle is unlikely to prove criminality. I doubt penalizing individuals for owning a bike (as with counterfeit money) would work either: if I go to a used bike shop to buy a bike, they're not going to give me the "stolen discount" - the shop is going to mark it up to the same price as legitimate used bikes.

pavel_lishin12• 14 years ago

> Likewise, delegating to underlings to sell the bikes also seems too risky, as several people now know about the enterprise.

It seems to work for drug dealers.

greiskul• 14 years ago

Well, but with drugs I assume a lot of purchases are from repeat costumers, so it's easier to call less attention.

wheeldonkey• 14 years ago

i just had my bike stolen on 8/3 in portland. the thief tried selling it on craigslist up in seattle, and i made a youtube video about it...

http://www.break.com/index/bike-thief-tracked-down-and-buste...

i've been looking into the thief... his usual m.o. is to take them down to eugene. he also picks up different ones while he's down there, and sells them here in portland and seattle. i think his theft ring has a couple of other people involved, but i haven't been able to confirm it. i am hoping to do a follow-up video about this.

daveman2• 14 years ago

A few months ago I saw a tweaked-out guy at 6th & Howard in San Francisco (just outside the Techshop) literally trying to saw-off a U-lock in broad daylight. A bunch of other homeless guys were lazily watching with amusement.

I really would love to build a pepperspray-bomb-in-a-U-lock, if only I could do so without being instantly sued by a litigious thief.

frankus• 14 years ago

Bike theft seems like one of those quality-of-life crimes (like graffiti and coercive squeegee-monkeys) that's begging for some kind of creative enforcement strategy.

- If there's an open-air bike market at 7th and Market, it seems like you could use some of the same strategies that have been used to shut down open-air drug markets.

- Police in the greater Vancouver area have had a lot of success with bait cars, but I'm not aware of bait bikes being used more than experimentally (cf. tocatchabiketheif.com)

- If one could devise a concentrated enforcement strategy, one might not need to "take six guys off a murder" for very long. Basically the idea would be to tip a high-crime-low-probability-of-punishment equilibrium and into a low-crime-high-probability-of-punishment equilibrium that should presumably remain equally stable. One approach would be to target a geographic area and communicate (and follow through on) a threat to throw the book at anyone caught stealing a bike.

(pretty much all of these are stolen from the book When Brute Force Fails).

mootothemax• 14 years ago

I think the problem is not catching the bike thieves, more that the punishment given for stealing bikes is minimal, so it's not worth the police doing much about it.

ethermal• 14 years ago

But you could make possession of stolen property (the bike) a major crime with prison and financial punishment and you weaken the demand side of things.

Then using RFID or similar technology, you could embed a RFID tag somewhere in the frame. Then allow someone to report a stolen bike with a police report, very similar to a stolen vehicle report and then using remote scanners you could scan for stolen bikes very easily. All it takes is fear of a stolen bike to scare away potential buyers.

aidian2• 14 years ago

In Cali, theft of anything under $400 in value is a misdemeanor...that means stealing your typical bike under about $1000 isn't a major crime.

zurn8• 14 years ago

Increasing severity of penalties doesn't generally work for cutting recidivism (and you'd have to steal a lot of bikes to make the caused harm proportionate to jail time for a person, even if you subscribe to the lizard brain "revenge" school of thought on punishment).

seany• 14 years ago

"- Police in the greater Vancouver area have had a lot of success with bait cars, but I'm not aware of bait bikes being used more than experimentally"

I know Santa Clara PD has (is?) using bait bikes to some extent. AFAIK the units themselves are made by pegtech.com .

DannoHung• 14 years ago

How about a pressurized U-lock that releases a neon-pink paint cloud if the cylinder or restraining bar is cut-through?

I guess the trick would be making it get on the thief and all over the bicycle.

The best would be if it also stank to high heaven.

buffportion• 14 years ago

That's great, until you lose your key

stcredzero4• 14 years ago

You can also directly attack the economics of bike resale. Make an inexpensive bike with a combined drive shaft, shifting mechanism, and lock mechanism internal to the frame. Put it together in such a way that it's quite possible to disable the lock, but impossible to do that without rendering the bicycle inoperable.

Then, instead of selling these bikes, one leases them. It would be impossible to sell such a bike without the buyer knowing it was stolen. (It may also be impossible to manufacture such a bike in the first place, but I'm not sure one could know without trying.)

hessenwolf4• 14 years ago

You'd probably be sued for damage to clothing and emotional stress.

Someone• 14 years ago

Not in Vancouver or even on the new continent, but http://translate.google.nl/translate?sl=nl&tl=en&u=h... shows an arrest from the Dutch supreme court on bait bicycles ("lokfietsen") that shows the method gets used.

dimitar• 14 years ago

The Netherlands seems to be a good place look if there are any solutions - they have a huge percentage of people using bicycles in their cities.

davidw2• 14 years ago

I heard a story, but I have no idea whether it's true: bike shop in San Francisco leaves very shiny, high end bike outside. Thief hops on bike, heads down hill to make a quick getaway. Thief soon discovers that the bicycle's brake cables are not connected. CRASH.

pmahoney• 14 years ago

I believe that it's illegal to booby-trap one's house, and I've heard of (apocryphal?) cases of burglars suing homeowners for injuries sustained during a burglary...

I imagine such a brake-less bike would fall in that category.

vacri5• 14 years ago

Regardless of what you think should happen to the thief, that's extremely irresponsible given bystanders or other people's property.

hessenwolf4• 14 years ago

This is a very middle-class idea, if you don't mind me saying. Most of the bikes we had growing up were cobbled together from bits of other old bikes, and the method of stopping was to use the arch of your foot in the space at the back where the brakes should be.

It wore out one shoe faster then the other, but you could do cool skids.

fghh45sdfhr32• 14 years ago

Bike theft seems like one of those quality-of-life crimes (like graffiti and coercive squeegee-monkeys) that's begging for some kind of creative enforcement strategy.

Or just plain old boring regular enforcement, like Germany and Japan have, which is how they end up with a far lower crime rate than the US or the UK for example.

(They also have a better social safety net, that's part of their low crime rates too.)

tadfisher2• 14 years ago

Violent crime, maybe, but bike theft is pretty common in Japanese cities. It's not so organized as it is in the West, but usually drunk people who "borrow" bikes to get home.

tkresident• 14 years ago

Having had two regular bicycles stolen over ten years in Tokyo, I would disagree that the problem is non-existent in Japan, though street crime is indeed relatively rare. Bicycles are commonly used by the majority of people. Authorities need staff dedicated to keeping streets near stations from getting clogged up with secured bikes. An unsecured bicycle near a station might be used as a free ride home by a drunken salaryman, but rarely stolen as a cash generator I guess. No social safety net really exists in Japan. Yet in general, Japanese would not even consider crime when in financial dire straits. I don't believe this has as much to do with enforcement as acute social awareness.

Tichy• 14 years ago

Bike theft is common in Germany. There are also gangs who drive around with a truck at 3am and steal bikes from backyards. Brilliant: nobody sees them unlocking the bikes in the backyards.

alttag• 14 years ago

I've done some work with a local (university) police force that used bait bikes. They'd attach a GPS device, secure it with a poor lock, and wait a couple of days. I went with them once to track down where the stolen bike was parked. Every once in a while they'd land on a ring selling all kinds of stuff on Ebay, but that was less common.

Part of their trouble was, being an underfunded public agency, their bike wasn't of the expensive sort, so I got the impression they were seeing diminishing returns over time as the bike became less desirable. They did this with laptops too, although their "bait" laptop no longer worked, and was really old. I could never get anyone to steal it.

I don't know what happened when the case(s) were turned over to the D.A.

When I was in Japan, the bikes-stealing dynamic was a bit different: the most common place to find your bike was at the nearest train station. The typical thief seemed to be running late for the train, and would borrow whatever was available.

saraid216• 14 years ago

> When I was in Japan, the bikes-stealing dynamic was a bit different: the most common place to find your bike was at the nearest train station. The typical thief seemed to be running late for the train, and would borrow whatever was available.

I feel terrible for finding this side-splittingly hilarious.

Blara• 14 years ago

There are GPS modules you can attach to your bike, if nothing else it could at least get the police interested if you say "My bike was stolen, it has a GPS and right now it is here"

mapster• 14 years ago

Agreed. Further, take the PD out of the equation. There needs to be a grassroots effort. Each new bike purchase should be in tied to register and be active in an online community to police the used bike market and put the swueeze on organized bike thieves.

ChuckMcM2• 14 years ago

I love priceonomics, every time I read one of their articles I learn something new (for example I didn't realize you could exchange a stolen bike for sex). Approaching this as an economics problem seems like a good approach. I think if bike manufacturers built in ways to uniquely identify bikes, and those idents were economically infeasible to remove, then you could do a bitcoin style distributed database of the current 'real' owner of a bike, then the cops could periodically go into 7th and Market or where ever, collect all the stolen bikes and tell their owners they are recovered. If you remove 1/2 the bad dealers inventory every month its going to cut into their profits, and if they stop buying stolen bikes in bulk you make it harder to flip them etc etc.

ljf• 14 years ago

Most (all?) bikes have a serial number stamped on the bottom of the 'bottom bracket' the part that the pedals go into. These serial numbers are unique per bike brand, but not universally unique.

The serial is pretty hard to remove, without it's removal being obvious to anyone that looks, though the brand can be removed or changed - if that happens the serial wouldn't show as stolen.

If there was a lookup for serials then you could check if the bike was stolen, or if the bike was incorrectly branded (serial doesn't match brand), but there isn't a central place for this, unless the (ex)owner registers it on a service such as immobilise.com

kisielk3• 14 years ago

My fiance's bike was stolen a few months ago. By coincidence someone who was a friend of a friend of her's ended up buying it off of craigslist. We discovered this when he arrived at a BBQ riding her bike. When we asked about the details of his purchase, he sent us all the email correspondance with the bike thief.

The thief had actually given him the serial number of the bike, which he checked in the online police database and it returned no hits. The catch was that the thief slightly altered the serial number so that it wouldn't yield any hits. When he went to actually look at the bike he didn't notice the subtle difference in the serial number and assumed it to be legit.

aidian2• 14 years ago

JB Weld to fill in the old serial numbers, then use number punches to put in new serial.

ChuckMcM2• 14 years ago

Interesting, I was thinking something that could be read easily an not easily tampered with. Say an RFID embedded serial number in the bike emblem/badge.

rkalvi• 14 years ago

I think there is a decent underground operation of used bikes: I recently bought a bike off a used car bike shop in mountain view ( off of shoreline ). You walked in and there were 500 bikes ( in all shapes and sizes ) available. From vintage to kids to racing. You name it. I always wondered where they got their bikes from. Most bike owners dont report, keep track of the bike ids. And police dont have incentives to track them. If the margins weren't there, people wont steal them.

WalterBright• 14 years ago

My bike is a nice 10 speed I bought 35 years ago. It still works fine, is an excellent bike, and is worth maybe $25.

I doubt it's worth stealing.

billswift2• 14 years ago

Almost 20 years ago, I had a ten-speed junker I bought for $20 just for riding around town, only three gears actually worked, but it got me around. Somebody stole it off of my front porch.

akgerber3• 14 years ago

Vintage steel bikes have gone up in price quite a bit in the last 5 years or so, especially in big cities.

jarek• 14 years ago

Every bike is worth stealing, unfortunately. I had beater bikes stolen, one had duct tape on the rims, another one with visibly busted rear brake. I probably couldn't have sold them if I tried to; but then I don't sell to sketchy characters for $10 or part of a hit.

JoeAltmaier• 14 years ago

If expensive bikes wouldn't work for the thief or their client, they would stop. RFID tag embedded in the frame, locking the headset? Just have to make it hard enough to not be worth it.

Steko• 14 years ago

I wonder if the large number of stolen bikes on the market basically depresses local prices to the extent that even if you have to buy a new bike you don't lose that much vs a world with minimal bike theft. The Japanese market might be relevant, as 10-15 years ago there was seemingly little bike theft and now it's rampant in certain areas.

king-ink• 14 years ago

Here in the Netherlands (with an average of 2 bikes per inhabitant) there is another big class of bicycle thieves: those whose bike just got stolen, and don't want to buy a new one (yet again)...

mobweb2• 14 years ago

Around where I live there's definitely another factor to consider: Opportunity theft. A lot of bikes get stolen simply because it's very easy to do so, especially downtown. On the weekends when there are lots of drunk people around, a _LOT_ of bikes get stolen simply because people are too lazy to walk or they just find it funny to steal a bike. These bikes sure as hell don't end up at some kind of black market, instead they are simply left at some place and somebody else picks them up. It's like a never-ending cycle of bike theft. Also it doesn't help that most bike locks are ridiculously easy to break.

Another thing that I've noticed (I'm an avid freeride-biker) is that there are actually gangs that target high-end bikes. They have spies at known bike-trails and follow people home. If they see an expensive bike they break into cellars, garages and sometimes even people's apartments just to steal a bike. The bikes are then taken apart and most components are sold right away (a second hand fork in good shape can still go for $1000+ in some cases) and the frame itself is shipped abroad and sold separately. I'm actually very paranoid because it's happened to two friends already... :/

lostnet• 14 years ago

I'm sure a significant portion especially in the high end can be explained by rational actors with pretty low prospects. But I'm suspicious that there isn't a lot more of the less rational going on. The hoarder mentioned in the article may not be an outlier and bike theft is also sort of a low stakes learning ground.

In anything approaching an urban center I see a lot of abandoned bikes (locked and slowly vultured.) They are generally attributed to lazy owners, but a portion may be decaying inventories of hoarders, joy riders and/or thrill seekers.

I'm reminded of inventories of locks on urban fences. Obviously the collections of not so rational (but social or antisocial) actors.

I think a good urban experiment would be a collection system that pays ~$5 a bike (and gives immunity once you arrive) and charges ~$7.50 to a verifiable owner before selling back into the free market of "used" bikes. A little cross between a repo-man and the can man, to keep the things a little tighter and make it more likely lessons are learnt on the cheap.

zurn8• 14 years ago

What kind of insurance options exist in the US for bikes?

Over here your basic home insurance covers the bike theft minus a deductible (often something like 200e). Then you can get a separate bike insurance for 25e/year which will cover the deductible and also register the bikes serial number in a database and they (claim to) do some cooperation with the police and border officials to flag stolen bike serial numbers and return stolen bikes to owners. Your bike also gets a special sticker which probably repels bike thieves. Many retailers automatically preregister bikes with this service and include 3 months of free insurance, and include ads for the full service...

marklabedz• 14 years ago

While we're at it, bike lock advice from one of cycling's old grey beards, Sheldon Brown: http://www.sheldonbrown.com/lock-strategy.html

alexfoo3• 14 years ago

That's a flawed lock strategy. I wouldn't ever want to do that. I always include the rear wheel and the seat-tube (or seat-stays) inside my D-lock.

"There is no need to loop it around the seat tube as well, because the wheel cannot be pulled through the rear triangle."

The two simple methods I've seen for defeating it (based on seeing just mangled rear wheels locked up to railings/bike racks) is to:-

a) Stamp on the rear wheel and fold it so that it fits through the rear triangle. (No tools required). b) Cut a bunch of spokes (easy to do with a pair of wire cutters) and press the rear wheel flat so that it fits through the rear triangle.

The rear wheel on one of my main bikes is £100; the rest of the bike is £1500. No chance I'm going to risk that.

Thieves won't care about not having a rear wheel if they're sticking bikes in the back of a van to sort out or sell off at a later date.

Sadly Sheldon isn't alive today to discuss and review that strategy.

miccla• 14 years ago

I love these Freakenomic-y types of articles. Really makes you think about very every day occurrences in different ways.

I thought maybe I could add some game theory into the mix, just for the sake of it. For example...

Following an economic perspective it could be viewed, given the suggestions made in the article, that for your average bike on the street it is almost impossible to protect against theft using a lock or by any other "practical" means. Therefore (bare with me) when you park your bike on the street you are in a sense "competing" with other cyclist in presenting the worst return for the criminal. Locks, paint jobs, parking locations etc. are just ways of saying to the thief "Hey, this is going to be difficult. Why not have a go at stealing that shiny looking bike next to mine." You are not solely competing against the criminals but your fellow cyclists!

Eliezer• 14 years ago

I wasn't surprised by the drugs part, but learning that stolen bikes are considered street currency actually makes me more bullish on Bitcoin. It's still a terrible idea, but it's got to be more convenient than using bikes as currency.

I wonder what would happen if the criminal world started experiencing hyperdeflation?

nrp2• 14 years ago

Sure, buy crack with Bitcoins, and wait around for 20 minutes for the block chain to verify. The same delay that makes it irritating for legal in person transfers makes it useless for hand to hand criminal transfers.

stcredzero4• 14 years ago

> In 1968, Chicago economist Gary Becker introduced the notion that criminal behavior could be modeled using conventional economic theories.

We need to start examining the motivations for cracking in the same way. Locks in the real world are far from foolproof, and work as much or more because of societal expectations and economics than they do because of their embodied technology.

What most companies do with DRM ignores reality in two important ways:

    1) Your own technological capability and manpower can be overwhelmed
         by the tech and manpower available to the Internet as a whole.
    2) If you have something of significant monetary or prestige value, 
         you are not going to secure it with a single supremely clever lock.

Real world security consists of a defense in depth. Real locks and safes aren't burglar-proof. Instead, they are rated to delay thieves for a certain length of time. Their purpose is to increase the risk of the transaction thereby making it uneconomical.

Crackers will always win if the payoff is worth the effort.

Presently, any software downloaded to a user's machine can be cracked. Therefore, do not try to prevent that -- it's a losing battle. Refuse the things that you can economically refuse. (Server-side functionality, service and support, participation online.)

Detection is 1000X as powerful, if the consequences are separated in time from the actual detection. If you give the game away immediately, you are providing your opponent data. If the consequences are delayed by 3 days or even several months, the economics of cracking become like the economics of fixing intermittent bugs and Heisenbugs.

Security needs to focus on economic leverage. Since your opponents have more time and capability than you, you need to ensure that they are spending 1000X more resources to combat your actions. Instead of needing to catch them every time, or your game is lost, make them need to catch you every time, or their game is lost. (The robber needs to get away with the heist every time, while the police only need to catch him once. However, the guerrilla fighters only need to get away with a raid occasionally, while the occupiers need to catch them every time. Yet in both situations, the 1st party has far fewer resources. Something to think about.)

dbz• 14 years ago

My guess is that bikes will get GPS devices put in them eventually. Then people will be able to track their routes etc. Maybe when that happens, people will be able to track their stolen bikes.

ffn• 14 years ago

How about a bike with a combo lock built into its gears so that all the gears will only spin if the correct combo is given. The built-in combo lock can also be rigged to detonate some wired-in explosive if someone attempts to forcefully remove it.

xfernandox• 14 years ago

Some bikes are REALLY expensive. Look at the lengths this guy goes to recover his:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poBajFv-Dyk

Don't mess with bikers. Something that's your mode of transit everywhere starts to mean more than just the $ value.

at-fates-hands• 14 years ago

The one thing I would've liked to see was the age breakdown of the offenders. I remember vividly in junior high there was a kid who stole BMX bikes, soldered off the serial number and then re-sold them for around $300 a piece. He got to be like a professional car thief in that he would take requests if someone wanted something specific.

It was a very lucrative side business for a 12 year old kid.

greggman• 14 years ago

When I was a kid (GET OFF MY LAWN!!!)

We used to be able to register our bikes with the police department. They'd stamp a registration number onto the frame of the bike using lettered taps and a hammer. The only way to take off the registration is to either file it down or cover it over, in either case a clear indication the bike is stolen.

I got a bike stolen 3 times. Twice I got one back when the police found it (once the bike had upgrades too. Better front fork, better grips and 2nd rider peddels had been added)

Anyway, I'm sure someone will cite "budget cuts" but I certainly wish they still registered bikes. It seems like in a city like SF there are enough cyclists, revenues from registering the bikes could pay for a few bike police.

nrp2• 14 years ago

My local police station in San Francisco still does bike registration: http://www.inglesidepolicestation.com/#!__bike-registration

The website looks like something out of the late 90's, and the form is a Word document, but it's nice that it exists. It evidently gets some use too, as they occasionally recover a stash of stolen bicycles and post pictures of the ones that weren't registered.

firebones• 14 years ago

Bike registration would be a great service to outsource to bike shops. It generates foot traffic for the shop, costs almost nothing, and the local PDs can work with the bike shops in a fashion similar to how PDs work with pawn shops.

Provide a national registry, sell ads, viola! YC 2013, baby! (Okay, maybe not, but a useful public service niche.)

btilly• 14 years ago

The problem is that if the police do bike registration, but nobody actually expects bikes to be registered, then nobody cares that their stolen bike is registered.

busted• 14 years ago

According to their website https://www.nationalbikeregistry.com/, the SFPD as well as other police departments in the Bay Area use the National Bike Registry.

ramchip• 14 years ago

That's still how they do it in Japan. Registration is mandatory for all bicycles. From what I hear you need to bring proof when there's a transfer of ownership, etc.

evoxed2• 14 years ago

Yep. The only downside is that if a policeman is in a bad mood you may get stopped and checked to make sure you aren't a thief. Only heard of it happening to foreigners (not myself though) but it's a good idea to keep a card in your wallet or a photo of your registration (which is actually a really good idea for anyone traveling/living abroad: if you can keep them in a safe/encrypted place, carrying a photo of your passport, gaijin card, etc. is a pretty good idea in case you put on the wrong pants one day).

bemmu• 14 years ago

In Tokyo they were really active in checking it too. Police going around and randomly stopping you to check your bike registration. I think I was checked three times in two years (maybe because I'm a foreigner).

jawr2• 14 years ago

Police stations in the UK will do this also, however they use some kind of UV ink as not to draw so much attention to it.

alexfoo3• 14 years ago

Various Police forces also do cycle marking for free, worth checking the website of your local force. This isn't UV ink but a unique number that is etched into the frame (they've different etches for different frame materials, I've had both steel and carbon fibre frames done).

MET: http://www.met.police.uk/transport/cycle_marking.html BTP: http://www.btp.police.uk/neighbourhood_policing/london_south...

funkdobiest• 14 years ago

They used to do this in D.C. , but the problem was engraving into your new bike will void the frame warranty. The police used to use this registration as a way to stop any bike messenger and check if your bike was registered. If it wasn't they impounded it and you had to pay a fine to get it back, usually $5.

cpeterso2• 14 years ago

In Berkeley, Karim Cycle is a "used bike" shop infamous for fencing stolen bikes. Everyone knows it, but proving it is too much work for the police. The Yelp reviews are funny but disheartening: http://www.yelp.com/biz/karim-cycle-berkeley-3

antihero• 14 years ago

If I had more time I do believe I'd enjoy getting a fairly fancy bicycle, having a friend park it up, lock it with a fairly crap lock, and then just chill out at a nearby cafe watching it, waiting for some piece of shit to steal it, and then following them and seeing where they go with it/beating the everliving shit out of them.

abecedarius• 14 years ago

So the penalty is near zero if you're caught, this says. Does that also go for thefts of other items of comparable price, like TVs? If not, why the difference?

rwallace• 14 years ago

Crazy idea time: since the problem with the demand end is the difficulty of telling the difference between stolen property and legitimate secondhand sales, what would happen if all sales of secondhand bikes were banned? Would the reduction in theft be worth the loss of end-of-life revenue plus slight erosion of liberty? Not a rhetorical question, I don't know the answer.

lkbm• 14 years ago

> He had to learn a life lesson a little earlier than I had liked - that there are some people in the world who are just plain mean.

We live in a complex world full of complex people with countless motivations. It's always tempting to dismiss someone as "just plain mean", but it's rarely accurate.

I realize this is somewhat off-topic. Just stood out to me.

Mc_Big_G• 14 years ago

A woman at work had her bike stolen in SF (off the front of a bus if you can believe that) and decided to go to every flea-market she could find in Oakland that weekend. When she found the bike she just took it and dared the guy selling it to do something about it. She just rode away. :)

6ren• 14 years ago

This is why I don't want to buy a second-hand bike.

binarycheese• 14 years ago

"Just because the risk of a crime is zero, that doesn’t mean that a criminal will engage in that crime. If that were the case, thieves would go about stealing dandelions and day-old newspapers"

Now, that's classic.

eightbitman• 14 years ago

What happens to stolen bicycles? Seriously, what happens to them? This article doesn't begin to address the question within the first paragraph, and if they can't format their article properly I can't justify spending time reading it.

rdl• 14 years ago

With crimes which are lightly prosecuted, I wonder if having infrequent but very high severity punishment works comparably to having consistent but moderate punishment.

In China, they do "Strike Hard" campaigns, where crimes which might normally be gross misdemeanor level (shoplifting, assault) are punished far more severely (sometimes by execution).

This might be a way to raise the expected cost of committing the crime, while not raising the cost of anti-crime enforcement that much.

etfb• 14 years ago

A suitably sociopathic individual could probably have a beneficial effect on the bike theft rates in a city by just going around to the places where stolen bikes are sold and beating the sellers mostly to death with a baseball bat. That'd be an intriguing experiment for an economist with the right sort of anti-social personality disorder (which is all of them, so I feel silly making the distinction).

hcarvalhoalves• 14 years ago

"If Goldman Sachs didn’t have more profitable market inefficencies to exploit, they might be out there arbitraging stolen bikes."

Ouch! LOL

Emann• 14 years ago

my friends bike being stolen: caught on tape in NYC. Lets find this guy!!! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1E1ck8LDlE&feature=plcp

tlb• 14 years ago

The current police policy is to not investigate thefts under some threshold, say $2000. So you can steal bikes all day long and never get caught. A better policy would be to investigate thefts of value X with probability X / $4000. It's roughly the same total work, but doesn't create a safe haven for low-value thieves.

jvdh• 14 years ago

I live in the Netherlands, and bikes here are omnipresent. They also get stolen. A lot. Which is why most bikes you see in cities tend to be not too great looking.

About 10 years ago in the city of Utrecht the bike stealing was a really big problem. Here also the stealing of bikes is really hard to get caught with. The police used decoy bikes to catch thieves trying to steal those, but also this only catches small parts of them.

Ultimately this has been solved by also changing the way people handle this. If your bike got stolen, you just went out into the city, found a junkie, and often he had a bike for sale. If not he would have one 10 minutes later.

The police changed their approach to this, and started cracking down hard on the selling of bikes on the street. Not only the people selling them, but also the people buying the bike. Even going so far as police officers going undercover and trying to get people to buy bikes.

Within months the stealing of bikes dropped to near zero.

hessenwolf4• 14 years ago

Freakonomics discusses the exact same factor with drug dealing and the oldest profession - adding risk to the seller results in increasing margins which attracts more sellers; whereas adding risk to the buyer results in the margins dropping too low to be worth even a small risk for the seller.

Also, when I see somebody on a re-sprayed bike, that hasn't obviously been re-sprayed with purely artistic intent, I want to beat them in the face until they die (lost too many bikes myself).

eru4• 14 years ago

My bike has been re-painted because the old paint was coming off. I guess that counts as another excuse.

jawr2• 14 years ago

A Dutch friend once told me that bike theft in Holland was pretty ripe, but it was more of a social norm; people wouldn't feel bad about stealing a rubbish bike and then leaving it somewhere for someone else to steal.. the bikes would almost become communal bikes.

adrianhoward• 14 years ago

One of the things I noticed when I was in Copenhagen for a week earlier this year was that people don't lock up their bikes as much. I saw lots of people leaving bikes unlocked when going into coffee shops, etc. when in the UK they'd be locking 'em up.

There were many bikes that were locked - but they looked more like "commuter bikes" near the metro and office buildings. Folk using them to get around during the day often seemed to leave them unlocked.

gadders2• 14 years ago

Slightly off topic anecdote:

A colleague of mine has his bike stolen from Ham House in Richmond, but fortunately the police quickly identifed the thief from CCTV footage.

It was a particularly hot day, and they could clearly see where the thief had his name tattooed on his back.

metdos• 14 years ago

Even though I locked it, my bicycle also was stolen in Barcelona in 15 minutes in middle of city.

OllieJones• 14 years ago

When I was a college student, I had my bikes stolen so often that I did two things: First, I started buying hot bikes cheap because, hey, legal bikes were expensive.

Second, I wrapped the frame of one bike in masking tape and smeared grease and paint on it. I kept that one for years; not even the local junkies wanted it. I guess they didn't notice my servicable Campy brakes and shifters, or didn't see the value in them.

I'm not sure the rational-actor theory applies to bike theft.

UNLESS it's the bike dealers behind the theft rings doing it to create demand, and they're just crushing the old stuff. Bwahahahahahaha. There's a batman movie in that villain theory.

bigeric23• 14 years ago

In NYC most stolen bikes are resold to delis and pizza shops for their delivery guys. Ever wonder why the minimum wage delivery guy is riding a $800 cannondale? They usually wrap the frame in duct tape so you don't recognize it. Get flat or a Bent rim? Just buy a new one from your local crackhead for $25 and you are on your way.

kiterow• 14 years ago

I know of someone who would steal bikes just to get back home from the bar. He was too cheap for a taxi. He had a huge stash of them in his basement because he didn't know what to do with them. So when he had parties at his house he started giving them to people so they could get home.

Jhansen• 14 years ago

We have the same problem in the major cities of Brazil. I live in Curitiba and i lost 9 bikes stolen 'till now.

Jhansen - www.ciclismo.esp.br

Catsy• 14 years ago

This seemed timely, so I thought I'd share: an electric bike company, OHM Cycles (http://ohmcycles.com) is running a free contest to win a really high-end bike lock worth $200. You can enter here: http://www.facebook.com/ohmcycles/app_143103275748075

What Happens to Stolen Bicycles?

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