Comment by dieselgate | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dieselgate | Hacker News Reader

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Interesting article for me, from a couple angles. I had a bike stolen about a week ago and dang, it sucks. Cool there is a customer facing tool to help with retrieval! It’s always weird when thinking about “encountering” the person selling a stolen bike, kind of scary to think of potential outcomes. Does this service provide any “tools” for that? [edit: article says asking for it back is usually sufficient but I’m still skeptical] On a separate note I went to middle/high school with Ryan Eastman - seem to remember he kind of disappeared from school because of pursuing professional cycling. Remember looking up his race times at one point and have always been kind of curious what became of him. Sorry to hear about his crash from this article(!) but also very glad he found something cycling related to work in. Good luck to all involved.

Edit: because this is HN I was initially thinking VanMoof also had a service one could attach to any bike. Seems it’s proprietary offering for their bikes. Original text left unedited above

> article says asking for it back is usually sufficient but I’m still skeptical

Personnal and friends experience tends to agree with the article advice. The intensity of the ask vary from "It's my bike" to "It's my bike and we don't want to call the cops about it, right?". Most of the time, they may try to sell it back to you though.

a few weeks ago, i came out of a neighborhood cafe to find my bike gone. on a hunch, i walked over to a nearby homeless encampment and saw my bike sitting there. i walked up to it, grabbed it, said "that's my bike", cursed the dudes out, and rode off. it felt a little crazy at the time, but it worked. the thief(s) didn't seem too fazed by it.

>nearby homeless encampment

I’m afraid to ask, but which country was this?

As an American, it sounds normal for the US.

Sounds normal for progressive metropolitan areas in the US. Not actually that common in the US as a whole.

Correct, because much of the US is sparsely populated, and homeless folks will aggregate where public services are available and accessible. You won’t find a homeless encampment in the middle of Nebraska where there’s nothing around but ranches.

It’s not “progressiveness” that attracts homeless encampments, it’s density.

Where there are people, there are resources. It’s got nothing to do with politics.

The politics provide the resources though. Compare Portland, Seattle, NY, SF, or LA to any city in Texas or Florida. Even correcting for population, its a fairly significant difference.

Non-political resources like a density of restaurants with food available, density of people who will provide help, charities, food banks, community centers, etc.

If you look at each state’s share of the total number of people in the US experiencing homelessness, is unsurprising that the states with most are also home to the latest cities. Texas is low per capita, at a state level, but when you look at rates within cities then Texas and Florida and Arizona cities start to pop up.

It’s not like conservative local governments have “solved” homelessness.

As long as there is homelessness, dense urban areas will always have the largest share of people experiencing homelessness because there are simply more resources, in the general sense, there. Where there are people, there are resources.

Let’s not forget climate as well. California, and the West coast, have a pretty favorable climate in general.

los angeles. i believe we have the highest homeless population in the country with the second largest gdp (over $1T for the greater metro area). our mayor and city council build 16 homeless housing units in a year and slap each other on the back for jobs well done all around.

Ya I’ve heard of the thief trying to sell it back to people too, it reminds me of a Larry David skit or something. I as well have no anecdotal evidence of any misfortune being caused by someone retrieving a stolen bike (other than not getting the bike back). Certainly if you have the legitimacy of a gps tracker or serial number the retrieval rate would seem higher. But literally tracking down or scheming to meet a thief over text via Craigslist conjures bad vibes for me personally.

The article doesn't pursue what happens if the alternative is encountered, but I'm curious what VanMoof's SOP is if the person in possession of the bike threatens violence or displays a weapon.

That's an escalation that only the most desperate would make, and they would probably play stickup at the ATM before doing all the work to steal bikes. A fancy bike is not worth the risk of serious prison time that comes with strongarm robbery. Regular theft is like 90 or 180 days in jail at most, and probably way less.

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