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Comment by jascii | Hacker News Reader

The avarage bike around here retails for about $1500, so $15000 in a single swipe isn't bad. I have seen an entire bike rack being pulled out of the ground using a truck and winch, so yes it does happen. Research has shown over and over again that penalty is seldom a factor in decision making, gain vs perceived risk of getting caught is, and stealing a single bike is still a felony. You don't need a tow truck license to own a flat-bed, craigslist is full of them.

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> The avarage bike around here retails for about $1500, so $15000 in a single swipe isn't bad.

The realizable value of stolen property is vastly less than the new price, even when stolen new. More like 1/10th.

> The avarage bike around here retails for about $1500

Average bike on the street? Do you have any source of similar claim?

Its mostly an informed guestimate from spending time in bike stores and seeing what other commuters ride. But here goes: In 2014 the average retail price was $714 nation-wide (https://www.statista.com/statistics/276088/average-retail-pr...) around here in Portland, OR people tend to prefer fancier bikes, the shop I worked for in 2006 had an average retail about $1700 back in the day but that was a higher end speciality store. In recent years e-bikes have gotten extremely popular here, their retail prices range from $2500 and up, skewing the average price point up further.

That's nowhere near the value of bikes you'll find on the street in the Netherlands. The average resale value is going to be much much closer to 50€ than $1500.

This used to be true in Amsterdam but has really shot up in recent years due to E-Bikes. In some areas every 5th or 10th bike is now an E-Bike, which are easily €700-1200 second-hand.

There's easier and less risky ways to make a few grand with a rollback though.

The kind of Orwellian things society would need to do to prevent these kinds of crimes of opportunity would cost far more than the crimes themselves cost anyway.

If you pass a pickup truck on the highway carrying an overflowing load of bikes haphazardly strapped down you passed a professional bike thief. They are carrying a load of bikes from one town, often a college town, to another. If you've bought a bike from a Craigslist seller who turns out to have a dozen or more bikes locked to a rack, often on a college campus, you bought a bike stolen from a town down the road.

But these are very seldom expensive bikes. The bad news is that your $75 bike you think is too cheap to steal from the train station rack is exactly what this kind of bike thief is looking for. They want low risk and fast turnover.

While that is probably a factor, most of those places seem more like the guy who raids all the neighborhood trash days to pick up free bikes that will be thrown away, fixes them and sells.

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