I've read that this has been tried somewhere and seems to work, though I don't recall the details. A municipality just needs to dedicate a small fraction of its resources to solving as many bike thefts as possible. Even if that's a small fraction of the total, it can be enough to turn the tide.
Though I say that, and think back to Prohibition... which didn't involve the same addictive properties to which I'd attribute these properties of the War on Drugs, so I doubt myself.
The best way to deal with bike theft is for owners to get wise about how they store and lock their bikes. Some amount of common sense about bike choice helps too. If you can afford a $3000 bike you can also afford a secondary $100 bike that doesn't make bike thieves salivate while you're grocery shopping.
This worked for cars. Lojack, with their hidden transponder, caused a significant reduction in auto thefts. Lojack claims a 90% recovery rate. The main problem for bicycles is battery life. Someone needs to design a system which needs almost no power until the bicycle is stolen.
Lojack, which is a pre-GPS technology, does something like that. Their unit normally isn't transmitting. It's just listening to FM broadcast station subcarriers for its own serial number. When a car with Lojack is stolen, Lojack, which is plugged into police stolen car databases, has their FM stations broadcast the serial number repeatedly. The addressed Lojack unit wakes up and starts transmitting. Lojack makes a deal with police departments to put Lojack receivers in police cars. These light up when there's a transmitting stolen car in range.
You could do this today by connecting a digital pager to a GPS/GSM location transmitter. The GPS/GSM unit is normally off, and only turns on when the pager wakes it up. You can get six weeks of standby time on a digital pager easily. Add a power-from-motion device and you could probably keep the pager running indefinitely, as long as the bike gets some use.
OK, IoT crowd, get moving.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Bicycle-GPS-Tracker-GPS305-Real-time/...
Making bike thieves watch 30 seconds ads before they can disable the tracker would be vigilantism all right.
Knowing approximately where the bike is is only 1/3 of the battle. You still have to physically put your hands on it and remove it from whoever has it. I applaud the intent of a bike "lojack" but good luck getting the police to lift a finger when your bike tells you where it is.
That 50 bucks is better spent on a good U-lock upgrade.
Compared to those dramatic declines (and yes, 1993 was a pretty bad year for crime in the US, but that's the FBI's stats), motor vehicle theft has fallen off a cliff.
In 1993 there were 606 per 100,000 inhabitants. in 2012 there were 230. The new number is 38% of the old number.
I hear about fairly advanced car thefts in the UK all the time (RFID cloning, etc), but it's a problem that virtually doesn't exist anymore in the US in the eyes of car enthusiasts. (Yes, 20 year old Honda Accord parked in the ghetto is still a target. But modern vehicles in relatively good areas are simply not something we worry about anymore).
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2012/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
Now it's parts. Wheels, airbags, bumpers, etc.
It's might be challenging to make something that is cheap, long range (for RFID) and tamper proof of course.
Why not just a low tech BIN (Bicycle version of a Vehicle ID Number (VIN)) stamped in the frame on the upright. You could also have a QR version printed. A traffic warden then could scan a rack of bikes and find any "reported stolen" ones.
Bikes with no QR would look suspicious and you could check the BIN (as would QR-BIN not matching bike style, colour, location). The BIN could be changed, but then so could an RFID chip (or a tracker); ground off frames would also look suspicious and warrant additional investigation.
?
You'd have to convince bike manufacturers to add BINs to bikes, which is likely against their financial interests as they probably sell more new bikes if bikes are more often stolen.
A GPS device on a bike will be the same thing. You can't embed it into the frame either, since you as the legitimate owner need to replace its battery every now and then, which means it needs to be easily removable.
If they are only effective against inexperienced car thieves, they still have value. It's like minor security measures that keep out script kiddies.
"Sure, you can afford a $60k SUV, but you really should also have a $2k shitbox that you drive whenever you can't park it in a locked garage"
The solution to "nice things get stolen" is not "don't have nice things", it's "make it so people don't want to steal nice things".
If I'm just heading up to the store, my $100 pawn shop bike (which funnily enough was likely stolen since just the frame sells for 100+ on eBay) will do just fine.
For even sketchier times, like riding my bike to the local bar where they have no good place to lock up or I just don't feel like carrying a heavy duty lock, my Chinese made schwinn hybrid works nicely, handles variable road conditions perfectly, and I wouldn't shed a tear if someone stole it.
Usually if you are really into bikes you have at least 3, a "nice" expensive cf bike, a fixed gear you bought a steel frame on Craigslist and turned into a fixie, and a multi speed road bike that is for shorter rides or medium commutes but will be left in a shady area for a prolonged amount of time. you could either add or replace one of the former with a mountain bike. And that's just pretty much standard, not even getting into when people start collecting biked just because they like to have them around.
Also if you are like me or any of my cyclist friends, part of your living space looks like the back of a bike shop.
Cycling is an extremely satisfying hobby, and can be very cheap if you read up on what you should buy and spend a couple weeks with a discerning eye looking through local deals.
Also getting to know your local bike shop owner will do you more good than anything else. The guy down the street from me just opened his shop with himself and his wife. And they just do it for the love. He has never ever charged me for minor tuneups or servicing, even though his time is worth at least $50/hr and I would gladly pay.
He even traded a bike of similar value for free just because it fit me better than the one I had.
But because of his generosity I have directed multiple people to buy from him instead of a big box bike store.
These people are slowly getting driven out of business due to the internet, but they offer services that the internet simply can't (yet, I am sure there is some mobile bike mechanic app in SF but I live in a different metro.)
Especially for those starting out, some advice from a skilled mechanic will go a long way and save you a lot of money and pain in the long run setting you up with the bike you need (rather than upselling something you dont,) and more importantly, saving you pain in the long wrong setting you up with a bike that fits your body.
If anyone would like advice how to get into the hobby or as to which kind of bike to buy, feel free to ask me and I would be glad to point you in the right direction.
In any case, a 60K vehicle is going to be significantly harder to steal and it will be far easier to get the police to pay attention to that theft than a 3K bike.
Keep gas-guzzling, 4-wheel-drive, wins-in-a-crash truck thing with rusted out underbody for December to March, and a nicer car that never sees salt for the warmer months. Exchange insurance from one vehicle to the other as necessary.
For that same reason, I ride the cheap $500 commuter bike to work or the store, and save the $4000 nice bike for long rides where I'm not going to leave it unattended. (well, that and the commuter bike has a rack so I can easily carry more stuff) I did ride the nice bike to work a few times, and parked it at my desk.
Ask yourself "why is that?"
Not all bikes, but the beater bikes in Amsterdam are all just rotating through the population. It's kinda like a game.
People inevitably say, "what will it cost?" But that ignores how much we spend now. Wasted lives, mangled minds, broken families that pass trauma and dysfunction to the next generation.
Having personally lost bikes and chased thieves, I applaud join this vigilante's efforts. But that can't be the only thing to do. No 7-year-old wants to grow up to be a meth-addicted bike thief. As doing a Five Whys teaches us, if you're serious about solving a problem, you have to attack multiple levels of causality at once.
Whatever the case... a good ulock doesn't hurt even in Denmark.
Connected to 97 thefts of bikes valued from $1k to $12k, including taking only "the most expensive one" of the several owned by the fella interviewed in that story.
Although he really was exploiting a weakness, in that people figured their bikes would be safe in their closed-up garages. I wonder if a good lock would have been enough to make him move on to the next target on his list.
but I truly despise bicycle thieves.
The problem is, as with all theft, unless someone witnesses the crime as it is occurring by the time the cop gets to the scene it is too late to find the bike. Experienced thieves will scope out bikes ahead of time and have a place to stash them quickly, and even if the police do arrive quickly, are they supposed to interrogate every person on a bike to check if it is stolen?
Basically they need to focus on these theft rings that steal bikes en masse and move them to another region to sell.
I have on more than 3 or 4 times seen a truck with the bed FULL of bikes I'm talking stacked 6 feet high with a cage around the bed.
Where did all those bikes come from? And ive never seen a decent bike in the stack. Mostly children's bikes (easiest to steal as I imagine children don't secure their bikes very well) and Wal Mart beaters.
This is what Japanese cops do. Every bike is registered to a name, and they radio to check the registered name and frame number against your id. It takes about five minutes. My bike has been stolen three times (probably by different people) and they recovered it twice and caught the thief the third time.
Even though government service is not run for profit, it still has to deal with scarcity, so economic and financial considerations still apply.