"I never give up hope of recovering a bike"

As I was writing "Bike Registration Sunday—local edition," I found myself wondering about the effectiveness of local bike registries. Unable to turn up via Google any relevant statistics, I decided to instead reach out to the police lieutenant in charge of the Arlington County (Virginia) Police Department's bicycle registration program, Heather Hurlock.

[commentary in brackets]

BTB: Can you quote me any statistics (or report any anecdotes) that communicate the effectiveness of the Arlington bike registration program?

HH: Happy to. Registration is running yearly around 890 – 1000. Registered bikes do not seem to get stolen, although maybe 5 or 6 a year may be taken because the owner neglected to use a U-lock [that would be me] or just was careless. Since I handle the Recovered Bicycle Program also, I have been fortunate in recovering several of these bikes thanks to residents being aware of the program. The oldest bike returned with an ACPD decal on it had been stolen 10 years prior [!]. It was recovered by Alexandria PD in good working order. I never give up hope of recovering a bike. I have promoted mandatory registration in the condos and apartments and those adopting the program have shown a decrease in larcenies; in some cases, no larcenies for a couple of years. During the summer registration is promoted aggressively by stapling notices on bikes stating "Use a U-lock and register." [I'm thinking about doing something like this to simultaneously promote both BTB and proper bike security. Post to follow.] I have received calls from around the country from those who are registered with ACPD and have moved and had their bikes stolen. The benefit – I have the information they need to aid in recovering their bike. All those who work in Arlington are welcome to register with the Arlington County Police Department. [DO IT.] And one more note: It appears that larcenies are down and it may be that the last offender was given a 12 year sentence [BTB covered that].

Bike Registry Sunday—local edition

I have a Google alert set up to deliver to my inbox each day a digest of recent news stories related to bike theft, and lately the lists have been awash in coverage of San Francisco's voluntary bike registration program, which launched on February 12.

Most of the stories about SAFE Bikes give the basics: A centralized database stores serial numbers, photographs, and other identifying information to help law enforcement return to their rightful owners bikes recovered in sting operations or chop shop raids. One oft-cited statistic: Of the 864 bikes recovered by police in 2012, all but 142 remain unclaimed.

Some accounts of San Francisco's latest attempt at combatting bicycle theft, though, include tidbits of human interest. SFGate's Kale Williams, while making the point that bicycle theft is a problem in San Francisco, cited Board of Supervisors President David Chiu's claim that thieves have relieved him of "4.7" bikes during his 18 years in the city. (Apparently that figure translates into "four complete rides, a few wheels and three seats.")

And the San Francisco Bay Guardian's story about how SAFE Bikes had registered 500 two-wheelers in its first two weeks ended with this postscript:

Guardian Editor Steven T. Jones had been planning to register his three bikes with the program, and then two of those bikes were stolen from outside his third floor apartment yesterday. They were a Trek Fast Track 420 road bike, purple with green tires, and a black Rocky Mountain bike with knobby tires and red handlegrips. Let his loss be a lesson to the rest of us: Don’t procrastinate, register today.

Which provides a great segue into this post's plug for local bike registries. While there are a number of national and even international registries out there (a few of them are mentioned here, here, and here), making your bike's existence and ownership known to authorities in your area will not only facilitate its recovery should it go missing but also alert local law enforcement to the presence of concerned and responsible cyclists.

So see if your police department or bike advocacy organization has a registry, and take the time to get your bike(s) on record. (Not knowing where your serial number is is not an excuse. We've been over that.) For readers in the DC area, I know of two registries: the Metro Transit Police Department's and the Arlington County Police Department's.

Check back later in the week for Arlington County police lieutenant Heather Hurlock's take on the effectiveness of local bike registries.

Anti-seismic (and Anti-theft) Bike Parking

Why is all the coolest bike infrastructure always elsewhere? I'm thrilled about the bikeshare programs sprouting up everywhere from Denver to Miami Beach to the Big Apple, but I want a Hovenring, damn it. Or an anti-seismic underground bicycle park like the ones currently in operation across Japan. (I'm amused that Time clarified "anti-seismic" as "code for earth-quake resistant." Seems like a reasonably transparent term to me...)

   

Each of Giken Ltd.'s ECO Cycles stores upwards of 200 bicycles below street level, away from both the elements and potential thieves. What I like best about the video below is the bit about the research Giken did to figure out how to squeeze as many bikes as possible into the available real estate (without compromising the automated removal of the stowed cycles, of course). It reminds me of the sorts of packing problems mathematicians ponder—except with a practical application that I can immediately grasp.

Faithful, Ride-along Bike Security

This short post is a follow-up of sorts to February 7th's "Get Yourself a 'Killer Wolf Dog'." Here's a guy who does appear to rely on a canine companion for his bike security needs:

More cute than scary, though. Has Fido been trained to bite the hand off anyone other than his owner who tries to make off with the bike?

XKCD on the Frequency of Bike Theft

Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, over my morning bowl of oatmeal, I check out the latest installment of xkcd, a self-proclaimed "webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language." Bike theft may not have cracked the top-four list of most treated topics, but it did make an appearance in yesterday's offering.

Titled "Frequency," the comic features a 10 by 5 grid of words and phrases flashing according to how often the events they describe occur. It's mesmerizing to watch, and interesting if you fancy, say, a visual representation of the relative frequency of earthquakes of magnitudes 1, 2, 3, and 4 or care how the pace of car production in the United States compares to that in China or Germany or Japan.

Now I have no idea how Randall Monroe came up with the numbers he used to create the graphic or, therefore, how much stock to put in them. According to the hover-over explanation, the "comic shows estimated average frequency." For whatever it's worth, Monroe estimated the frequency of bike theft at one bike every 25 seconds.

That's the reading I got, anyway, when I took a break from contemplating cat adoption and bottle recycling and domain registration and sex in North Dakota (!) long enough to put a stopwatch on the time lapse between flashes of "SOMEONE STEALS A BICYCLE"...

"If we do nothing at all, then we are all to blame"

If, heaven forbid, I ever get another bike stolen, I want the theft to occur in Austin, Texas. That way I'll be able to enlist the Sith Lord Vader Squadron to help me get it back. According to the group's open Facebook page, the mission of the S.L.V.S. is "to protect every cycle and cyclist from the grasps of the worse people on earth- BIKE THIEVES."

If your bike is stolen in Austin, you post a photo of it on the S.L.V.S. Facebook page, and members of the squadron will try to track it down on one of their weekly recovery rides.

"We use internet tools, logic and word of mouth to locate, recover and make sure the individual(s) in question gets the consequences they deserve (of course legally) to the highest extent," the Facebook page explains.

As the group's founder and president Michael Johnson told Austin's KXAN News, the Sith Lord Vader Squadron recovered 47 bikes in 2013:



Want to know more about the S.L.V.S.? Moving to Austin and wondering how you can join? Check out the Austin Post's story "Two Wheeled Justice: On Patrol with Austin's Bike Vigilantes."

"It's not mine but I don't care"

When Ben Davis's wife's bike was stolen from inside the couple's locked garage, Davis added snarky onscreen commentary and a soundtrack—Freezepop's "Bike Thief"—to the security camera footage and posted the result on YouTube:

 

Davis composed "this little homage to the uselessness of surveillance cameras" to make his wife laugh, he said.

You can read the full story here, but this is how it ends: Based on a tip from a neighbor who watched the video, Davis was able to track down the thief—dressed exactly as in the footage, despite the three weeks that had elapsed—and turn him over to police. The 51-year-old culprit was subsequently sentenced to eight years in prison.

[Anyone know of any other bike theft songs??]

Get Yourself a "Killer Wolf Dog"

I can think of two things people commonly leave chained (or tied—somehow affixed to something immobile) outside restaurants and convenience stores: bikes and dogs. Maybe anyone who owns one of each should consider using the latter to protect the former? (Assuming the pooch is sufficiently threatening, that is.)

As Mtbr reported on January 23, thieves recently relieved Santa Cruz Bicycles of $100,000 worth of high-end carbon demo bikes, cutting a chain link fence and dismantling padlocks to do so.

Apparently Mtbr's account of the theft got folks in the beach town of Santa Cruz riled and ready to assist in recovering the stolen property—or in exacting revenge against the thieves.

Mtbr quoted Santa Cruz Bicycles Media and Communications Manager Scott Turner: "Seems nothing brings a community together more than the prospect of some good-old fashioned vigilante justice, though we don’t condone that at all."

The same Mtbr post included a picture of a napping and very non-intimidating looking husky with this caption: "Santa Cruz has coaxed killer wolf dog Tag Heuer out of retirement to keep future would-be thieves at bay."

Now I can't swear to the seriousness of this threat, but enlisting a guard dog to frighten off thieves might not be a bad idea. I'd throw my bolt cutters back into my bag pretty quickly if withdrawing them had sent a sizable canine snarling fang-faced in my direction...

"The licorice lock was my first mistake."

Despite its allusion to Lifehacker's deservedly harsh characterization of cable locks, the title of this post is not my favorite line from Kashmir Hill's piece in Forbes last week about recovering a bike that was stolen from her. That designation belongs to this charmer:

It’s hard to describe the feeling of seeing your stolen property listed for sale; it’s perhaps comparable to watching your significant other make out with a stranger.

Granted I've yet to spot an ad for my onetime Cannondale (or, for that matter, observe a boyfriend lock lips with someone else), but I imagine that with the above comparison Hill pretty handily captures the cocktail of emotions I'd experience if I did.

Hill's piece, "I Did Everything Wrong But Still Got My Stolen Bike Back," enumerates the mistakes the Forbes staffer made immediately before and after the Trek she was borrowing from her landlord got stolen from San Francisco's Kearney Street:

1. She locked the bike using only a flimsy cable lock.
2. She left this insufficiently secured ride in a neighborhood plagued by bike theft.
3. She alerted the Craigslist seller that she was onto him/her.
4. She didn't have the bike's serial number.

Hill told her story so that others might learn from her experience. One of her recommendations I followed ASAP:

If you’re a bike owner, I encourage you now to take a photo of your bike’s serial number and email it to yourself.

Read and learn, people, read and learn.

Patrick Symmes: "I am not done with this."

As a follow-up to an October post directing readers to check out Patrick Symmes's Outside piece about his exploration of the "dangerous underworld of vanished bicycles," I contacted Symmes to see if he'd answer a handful of questions for posting on BTB. He graciously agreed:

BTB: Are you still riding Bike Six [a black, single speed Symmes bought on a San Francisco street for $125]? And are you still securing it with the "11 pounds of chain" you mention at the end of your Outside piece?

PS: I still ride Bike Six daily. However, I stopped using the 11-lb chain. I have a Kryptonite U-lock, in my analysis those are more than adequate. A chain was helpful in New York and San Francisco, high-theft environments where I really worried about losing the front wheel or needed to secure it to elaborate structures, but in Portland where I live now, theft is less common.


BTB: What's your opinion on the crop of tech locks—LOCK8, for one—hitting the market? 

PS: This is welcome, and represents the future. The smart-phone features are exciting. However, current models are unimpressive to me. My Garmin GTU10 trackers continue to give me problems from a software perspective, they just don't work right sometimes. The LOCK8 seems to have all the right goals for notification and alerts, for sensors of various kinds, but it is large and very obvious—perhaps there is a deterrent value in that. But regular bike thieves are savvy about GPS trackers already, and will know exactly what they are facing with such an obvious lock. I like a subtle or hidden approach, surprise is always important for catching thieves. And I'll note, the cable they are using is obviously too small for certain high-theft areas. Basically, there are two kinds of locks—U-locks and all others. Many thieves simply won't bother with a U-lock, regardless of who makes it. My ideal lock would be a regular U-lock and a separate, built-in GPS or other tracker, preferably hidden inside the frame tubes, where a thief cannot see or remove it.


BTB: Have you seen enough of "America's bike-crime underbelly," or could you see yourself venturing into that world again sometime? 

PS: I am not done with this. I continue to keep a charged GPS tracker installed under the bike seat, in case the bike is stolen. I even skip using the U-lock sometimes, and lock the bike with only a wafer thin cable for children's bikes, a cable you could cut with a pair of nail clippers. Part of me wants to tempt robbers—less to get revenge or to chase someone down than to continue to investigate and expose how thieves work, where they take bikes, and particularly how a bike moves from thief to middleman to seller to customer. I want to expose it and write about it. I almost feel disappointed when I come outside and it wasn't stolen!


BTB: Do you keep up with bike theft news, and, if so, do any stories stand out? 

PS: I hear from a lot of people now. Clearly, emotions run very high on this matter, so high that I compare it to the way 19th century people felt about horse thieves. Sometimes a story about a bike thief goes viral—like the Facebook post by a Canadian woman who stole back her own bike after seeing it for sale online. She asked the "seller" if she could take it for a test ride. She just kept going. People cheered her on. This is a result of a the sense of impunity, the idea that criminals face really no consequences at all for stealing bikes. [BTB wrote about the incident Symmes is talking about.]