"Another bike guy saw a sketchy wrong size dude..."

Anyone in need of a Friday bike-recovery fix should check out Bryan Hance's enumeration of all the bikes Bike Index helped return to their owners in March: 34 in total.

The prevalence of bike theft may shake your faith in humanity, but Hance's snippets of recovery stories will restore at least some of it.

"I am so grateful to the Bike Index community!" wrote the owner of a recovered 2007 Cannondale CAAD 8, and the registry does seem to have empowered cyclists to look out for one another.

Messages like this one, sent via Bike Index to the owner of a 2011 Giant Talon 29er, make me smile (leaving aside the recklessness of confronting a bike thief): "I found your bike, it's in my car. I confronted a dude in Ballard for it. Call me!"

These recovery stories feature an "awesome bike mechanic" and a "good samaritan" and "a kind soul [who] ran into a street peddler who clearly didn't purchase" the 2010 Kona Jake he was hawking.

Sometimes it takes another cyclist—or at least someone able to assess the size (mis)match between a bike and a person—to spot a thief.

"Another bike guy saw a sketchy wrong size dude riding my bike in a shady area," reported the owner of a 2006 Trek Portland. "He offered to buy it, bought it, contacted me through Bike Index and returned it to me!"

So keep your eyes peeled, pro-bike people, and do what you can to help Bike Index reunite cyclists with their rides.

Across the Pond: BikeDock and Cyclehoop

No doubt I'd be aware of many more advances in bike infrastructure if my Google Alert returned (and I could read!) news stories in Danish or Dutch, but thankfully I can, even with my linguistic shortcomings, learn what British bike enthusiasts are up to. Two London-based initiatives caught my attention this week.

BikeDock grew from Denis Quilligan's conviction that a cyclist should not have to choose between having a wheel stolen and lugging two locks around. In Quilligan's design, the bike rack itself does the work of the second lock:  

Since six BikeDocks were installed in the London suburb of Dagenham a year ago, no thefts have been reported, and the rack is currently being tested in Central London. May it spread far and wide!

Cyclehoop takes a different approach to bicycle parking, converting existing street furniture into someplace a cyclist could feel good locking his or her bike: 

Launched in London in 2008, Cyclehoop has been adopted across the UK. One concern, though: What's to stop a thief from uninstalling the Cyclehoop (installation doesn't look like it requires terribly exotic tools) and then lifting the bike over the post as before? I'd have to assess the topology...

Side note: Hooray for public bike pumps!

"The bolts and screws are already there"

Your bike's got perfectly good bolts, say the creators of the Hexlox. All you need is a way to prevent would-be component thieves from loosening those fasteners. And Hexlox, fully funded on Kickstarter well ahead of its April 14 deadline, promises to do just that (just ask the Berlin Lockpicking Society!):

"I’m telling people: this is not yours."

The Guardian picked up the Bike Repo Batman story and secured the first interview with the vigilante they're calling simply "Bike Batman."

So to fill in some of the heretofore missing details:

• Bike Batman is a 6'4" thirty-something engineer.
• He began his bike recovery efforts in 2015.
• BB is largely motivated by the desire to uphold Seattle's reputation as a friendly city.
• Our hero does inform police of his meet-ups with sellers. In more than half of the 22 cases in which he has reclaimed stolen bikes, the thief has been arrested.
• Bike Batman is not foolhardy; he admits that he once aborted a recovery mission for fear of being jumped by a group of suspected thieves. BB characterizes his actions this way: "I’m not out fighting crime and punching people. I’m telling people: this is not yours."

Want to know more? Read the Guardian's full story.

Bike Repo Batman

Photo credit: Sevi_Lwa via VisualHunt / CC BY-NC-ND

One man has made it his personal mission to, as the Seattle Times' Evan Bush puts it, "restore justice to the two-wheeled world." Dubbed "Bike Repo Batman" by Bryan Hance of Bike Index, the anonymous vigilante recovered more than 20 stolen bikes in 2015.

BRB compares bikes hawked via sketchy classifieds with those listed as stolen on registries like Hance's. When he finds a match, he arranges to meet the would-be seller. Once face-to-face, BRB presents proof that the bike is stolen and hints that the police might be interested. Often the seller surrenders the bike, which BRB can then return to its grateful owner.

One beneficiary of BRB's recovery efforts describes her bike's savior as part do-gooder and part thrill-seeker: "The impression I got from him, and stuff his wife said, [is] he’s kind of an adrenaline junkie," she told the Seattle Times. "It’s his way of giving back to the community."

Leave No Trace (or Do, If You Want to Get Caught)

Photo credit: Xavier Roeseler via VisualHunt.com / CC BY-NC-SA

If, as a bike thief, your plan involves leaving possessions at the scene of the crime, best to wipe them down first. Briton Andrew Grubb learned this the hard way in February.

Grubb rode a rusty old bike to Bristol Parkway station, where he stole the frame and rear wheel of one bike and the front wheel of another. He cobbled the pilfered property into a complete (non-rusty) ride and took off, leaving the bike he'd arrived on behind. Along with—it turned out—his DNA.

Tipped off by witnesses, the British Transport Police's forensic team swabbed the bike, recovered the DNA, and identified Grubb—a known bike theft who lived in the neighborhood—as the culprit. Appearing in Bristol Magistrates' Court, Grubb was ordered to pay £1,000 and £40, respectively, to the cyclists whose frame/rear wheel and front wheel he took.

Moral for the cyclists (as opposed to the would-be bike thieves) among you: Don't lock your bike solely by the front wheel, but be sure to secure it, too!

A Better Staple

In January 2015 we learned that Portland's ubiquitous staple racks are sometimes—if seldom—cut clear through.

And just last week the BBC reported that bike thieves in the UK have taken to cutting racks and then hiding their handiwork with tape to fool cyclists into thinking they're locking their rides to uncompromised infrastructure.

But bike security is nothing if not an arms race, and the city of Portland has just upped its game. As Jonathan Maus announced on BikePortland.org, the Portland Bureau of Transportation has revamped the staple rack: they've added a steel crossbar, placed a floating wire rope inside the rack's steel pipe body, and instructed installation crews to ground the racks in 18-inch deep concrete foundations, as shown below.

While the new racks won't replace existing ones, they will be used in all future installations. Ball's in your court, bike thieves.

'Bolt cutters' is not, in fact, one word

What to do when a man approaches you pushing a bike with one hand and wielding bolt cutters in the other? 

Seattle's Scott Gamble opted to give the "crackhead" (Gamble's word) $20 for the Trek 620 in question, hoping he'd be able to reunite the bike with its rightful owner. 

Gamble's Craigslist ad—which cautions would-be bike claimers that they'll have to furnish details to convince him of their legitimacy—has yet to bring the owner forward, however. 

So is the late-80s model Trek in fact "not a special bike" as KIRO 7's Gary Horcher had the cheek to suggest in the station's segment on Gamble's action? Here's hoping that whoever has tuned, cared for, and tooled around the Emerald City on this ride connects with Gamble soon. 

One of my favorite parts of this story, oddly, is the correction appended to Gamble's ad. Apparently he first wrote "bolt cutters" as one word and was informed—by someone trolling Craigslist??—of his error. "However 'crackhead' according to merriam-webster.com is a single word meaning 'A person who smokes the illegal drug crack,'" writes Gamble, "so I hit that one out of the park. Go me."

Go you indeed.

Indelibly ID Your Bike

BTB brought you news of anti-theft dots back in March. Apparently the trend of slathering one's possessions with microscopic identifiers is catching on across the pond as well. German startup Bike-ID is a bike registry that encourages registrants to (1) mark their rides as registered with a security sticker and (2) apply micro-tags liberally.

A Bike-ID "marking kit" includes 300 titanium micro-tags, each the size of a sand grain and all bearing a serial number unique to the registrant. The micro-tags are suspended in a glue that cannot be removed from the bike—such is the claim, anyway—without seriously damaging it.

Marking kits are available for pre-order now.

"The bike to conquer them all"

Had I not already maxed out my apartment's bike storage capacity, I'd be sorely tempted to back Boston-based Fortified Bicycle's latest Kickstarter campaign. I like that they've designed a bike specifically for riding around pothole-ridden, inclement-weather-plagued cities teeming with would-be thieves. Available in single- or eight-speed (the latter model with disc brakes). Check it out: