If anyone has recommendations for stealth theft detection/tracking devices I’m all ears.
Your wheels and components might still get stolen, but not much is really going to stop that. You can add a cable lock if you really want to but they're easy to cut through.
Bike registration (https://bikeindex.org/) might help in some circumstances.
But really, insurance is the thing that will cover you. Many renters'/homeowners' insurances will cover theft of bikes too, even when you're away from home, so you don't necessarily need supplemental bike insurance.
The thing about the trackers is that they're for after-the-fact recovery, not deterrent (especially if they're stealth). It's just going to get parted out, so if you're lucky you might recover the frame and not much else.
Vehicle registration works, but takes a bit of effort:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=el1Xznv5ge4
Vancouver had a 42% drop in theft after joining this program:
* https://project529.com/garage
Created by X-box co-founder:
Often I don’t think the bike theives check if the bike is “good”. My cousins bike was just over $150 new and was stolen. He had a cheap lock because he thought who would steal this.
I’ve been riding 10 years a moderately decent bike. No issues but I use a U lock which is decent.
Please lock through the frame. I’ve seen like 6 front wheels locked to bike racks with the rest of the bike gone..
The new bikes had GPS attached, but they limited the numbers, due the theft. Those slowly disappeared, too. Last I saw, there were just a few bikes at each bike rack, compared to maybe 50 at each.
A big waste imo, though newer models have trackers inside the battery - smart considering it's quickly becoming the most valuable part.
Is it? Or were your cops right and doing their job?
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
I mean thief can steal one for their own purpose, but then what? He steal another one every weeks?
I dont get it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Even if you’ve locked it overnight for multiple days at the main train station (tested in Düsseldorf and Kiel), it’s going to be fine.
If the lock is a cable lock, it's worthless. If the lock is solid metal over 5mm, it can only be cut by angle grinder. Once you are in angle grinder territory, whether it's 5mm or 15mm doesn't seem to matter. So i think there is no point spending over $100 on a lock.
Additionaly, you can use a hydrawlick jack to break d-locks, but that doesnt work on chains and is very dependant on how exactly you locked up
If you have a bike lock/chain that can resist bolt cutters, you're probably fine for everything other than leaving it overnight. Casual bike thieves are looking for easy money and likely aren't going to bust out an angle grinder in the middle of the day unless your bike is obviously worth a grand+.
I have a hefty Abus “sold secure” (requirement of insurance) D lock that I lock through the frame, but I’ve watched enough lock picking lawyer to know this won’t stop thieves with angle grinders (most thieves now) or ones handy with a disc detainer pick.
But the exception is always high-value bikes. That's why I called out bikes that aren't "obviously worth a grand+". If you leave out a nice eBike or a superlight road bike, the thieves have solid financial motivation to risk breaking out the cordless grinder and making a ruckus to steal it. Hell, sometimes thieves would straight up wait for people to come back to their bikes after brunch or whatever and mug them for it after they unlocked it in Albuquerque. No tools needed other than a knife.
I used white engineering reflective tape. They'd have to be very dedicated thief to notice to the Deore XT components.
Plus, the reflective tape is very visible at night.
The thing is people aren't stealing them to always sell them. Sometimes it's just easier to quickly grab a bike when the thief needs to get across town for some other reason. When they get to where they want to go, they just ditch the bike. Sometimes I think some people just want to steal a bike for no real reason.
In Seattle, I've seen gigantic piles with hundred of bikes in them just sitting in a homeless camp. They clearly aren't selling those bikes, as they've been sitting out in the rain for months, or even years now. And I guarantee those homeless camps aren't full of multi-thousand dollar bikes.
https://pimpmybikeretail.co.uk/product/sherlock-bike-tracker...
The reasoning is simple: bike thieves disproportionately contribute to climate change by discouraging large-scale bike use. This must be punished.
Please don't - this is typical 'tough on crime' trick: promise long sentences, so easy - longer sentence-less crime, right? Wrong. Sentenses are useless if no-one ever gets caught. Look at countries with the toughest sentenses in the world, and you will find they have loads of crime
You actually have to use your brain, and think and plan, on how to make sure criminals are caught. You have to take real action like training investigators, installing trackers, registering property, etc.
For example in UK concervatives have been in power for 12 years, punishment got much harsher but crime is growing because they have cut police numbers, and you chance of getting caught is ~0%. The longer people get away with crime, the better they become at crime. Now we have a large 'talent pool' of highly trained thieves.
Perhaps the causality goes the other way here? Perhaps suffering under loads of crime makes people vote for tough sentences?
Bike theft is a very harmful crime. It stops the move to healthier lifestyle, it leaves people, often poor ones who don't have cars without means of transportation and it cause many to not commute by bike.
I want aggressive policing, including trap bikes set up by the police to fish out potential thieves and lock them for years once caught, alternatively make them wear GPS locator all the time. I want them to feel fear every time they think about stealing. Maybe empty "tough on crime" promise isn't enough but it's surely better than typical approach of "let's all think about those poor thieves" or victim blaming (just lock your bike with 2 U-locks and keep your eyes on it all the time if you don't want it stolen).
Yes it is, but I disagree that turning bike theft into a 20-year sentence is going to help.
> Idk, it seems theft is low in countries where they cut hands for it.
Russia has 99% conviction rate, long sentences and torture in prisons, yet crime rate is sky high. US has more prisoner and tougher sentenses than UK, but UK has less crime
Half the people here are engineers, think like one, about systemic solutions and not revenge. Crime is a business, it only happens because its profitable.
You could setup a city-wide LoRaWAN bike tracking network for $100,000, you could hand out $20 trackers to every cyclist and weld them to the frame, from the inside if you have to. You could produce airtags-compatiable trackers, register every bike and check them periodically, etc.
You could install safe cycle storage throughout the city, that is alarmed and has cameras and calls the police when it detects sound of angle grinder.
Thousands of different solutions are possible.
https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/theft/
Neither USA nor UK have tough punishment for theft. Theft is different than violent crime as that is most often caused by emotions/rage/etc. While theft is more calculated. It makes sense there is little consideration to punishment when committing the former but more when engaging in the latter.
Some people want to steal. Bikes are currently one of the easiest targets but if you make those difficult to steal they will move to another attractive thing like catalytic converters or purses until you lock everything. Aggressive policing and punishment wasn't tried yet in Western countries when it comes to theft. That would involve setting traps for thieves and taking the crime seriously instead of making naive calculation about the value of stolen items and ignoring long term cost and damage to social structure.
What is the basis for your certainty? We've done research on the subject, we know that certainty of punishment is a lot more effective than severity.
Noone thinks 'ow yeah, I am gonna do a year in jail', everyone thinks they will get away. I am not against setting decoy bikes that are actually traps, but thievs will learn to tell them apart. US police uses sting operations against hookers and drug dealers all the time, and there is no shortage of either.
https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/deterrence-in...
> ignoring long term cost and damage to social structure
You could try that, but you cant just have a special calculation for one crime. Then we must equally apply it to corporate misbehaviour, like illegally selling customer data or manipulating the market.
The paper you linked doesn't mention aggressive, proactive policing. It wasn't tried anywhere in the Western world. It mentioned punishment comparison in UK, Sweden and US and is about general crime. All those countries have similar punishment and attitude to theft. Meanwhile countries where they cut hands or has done so in recent past has very little theft.
I tend to agree it's more important to catch thieves than punish them harshly but the point is we are not doing either so I vote for people who at least acknowledge it's a problem.