April 23, 2014

Word of the Day: "Fly-Parking"

So I read the paper referenced in last week's post, and here are my takeaways:

  • Car owners would not stand for this. The paper cites the statistic that cyclists are slightly more than four times as likely to be victims of bicycle theft than automobile owners are to be victims of automobile theft. Imagine the uproar if car theft were as rampant as bike theft...
  • My Surly in East Potomac Park
  • There's a word for that?? I may never have locked my bike to a park bench, but many a railing and parking meter has stood in for a proper bike rack when none was available. Design Against Crime's Adam Thorpe coins the term "fly-parking" to describe this widespread behavior (see this paper). Fly-parking is "the securing of bicycles to street furniture not intended for that purpose, i.e. railings, lamp-posts, parking meters, benches, street signs and so on." 
  • Not everyone adapts enough. While the Montreal study found that those victims of bike theft who keep cycling seem to adapt to reduce their risk of being victimized again—61.1% change what kind of lock they use, for example—some fail to sufficiently safeguard their replacement rides. Nearly 20% of the survey's respondents had been victims of bike theft three times or more (!).
  • Cyclists who register their bikes are...what?! I'm just going to quote the paper on this one:
The model reports that cyclists who did not register their bicycles were 55.8% less likely to have been victims of bicycle theft than cyclists who did register their bicycles. This could be due to cyclists who knew about registration but consciously chose not to register their bicycles being more aware of the risk of theft, bicycle security, and locking techniques. Another hypothesis is that cyclists who did register their bicycles experienced a false sense of invulnerability and became more careless with bicycle security after registration.
  • Photograph your bikes, b!+¢hes! Only 27.8% of survey participants reported having photographs of their bicycle that they could give to the police to assist in an investigation. Most people are walking around with camera-equipped phones in their pockets these days, so there is no excuse for this!  

No comments:

Post a Comment