"Do You Feel Lucky, Punk?"

The New York Times has picked up on the subject of BTB's May 7 post, namely the use of bait bikes by the San Francisco Police Department. The Grey Lady ran "Police Use High-Tech Lures to Reel in Bike Thieves" on Tuesday and included with the story a short video prominently featuring San Francisco police officer Matt Friedman, who heads SFPD's anti-bike-theft unit:

Two notes:

• I take issue with Matt Richtel's characterization of bike theft as an "urban nuisance" (first sentence after the first photograph). Anyone who has had a bike stolen can testify that it's a not insignificant financial—and emotional—hit.
• Check out Officer Friedman's task lamp (visible at 0:42, 1:11, and 1:30). Notice anything? Look familiar?

Should You Adopt the Sheldon Brown?

I admit to proclaiming this rashly, but... My new goal in life is to have a bike locking strategy named after me.

The late Sheldon Brown does, so there's precedent.

Who's Sheldon Brown? Well, according to Wikipedia, Mr. Brown (1944-2008) "was an American bicycle mechanic and a recognized technical expert and author on bicycles." The longtime parts manager, webmaster, and technical consultant at the Harris Cyclery in West Newton, Massachusetts, Brown maintained a website offering a wealth of bike-related information. The site remains live, updated as necessary by Harris Cyclery, Brown's widow, and his friend (and fellow bicycle expert) John Allen.

On his page devoted to lock strategy, Brown described the locking method that now bears his name. Here's how the San Francisco Police Department's Anti Bike Theft Unit depicts it:



Take a good look at that U-lock placement. "People tend to buy the big clunky U-locks because they don't know how to use them properly," wrote Brown.

"A U-lock should go around the rear rim and tire, somewhere inside the rear triangle of the frame. There is no need to loop it around the seat tube as well, because the wheel cannot be pulled through the rear triangle. 

Some will object that felons might cut the rear rim and tire to remove the lock. Believe me, this just doesn't happen in the real world. It is indeed possible to cut the rim [hyperlink added] with a hacksaw, working from the outside to the inside, but first, the tire must be removed or cut through. It would be a lot of work to steal a frame without a usable rear wheel, the most expensive part of a bike, after the frame."

Will I adopt the Sheldon Brown as my go-to locking method? Perhaps. What I'd really like, though, is to figure out a way to improve upon it. Stay tuned...

"I try to make your life into an A-locking experience"

The James Bond franchise still has Hal beat, but, with the release of the fourth installment, Hal Grades Your Bike Locking is hot on the heels of Home Alone in the race to rack up sequels.

I introduced readers to bike mechanic and, it turns out, international celebrity Hal Ruzal in an October post and am pleased now to bring you Part IV, in which the purple-socked locking expert commends Citi Bike's security features, poses for a photograph with a Brazilian fan, and awards an A+ to New York cyclist Jen Petersen's lock job. Petersen's reaction to the stellar marks...well, watch the video:

Racks!

Can we all agree that there are not enough bike racks?

Just this past Sunday, I locked my Ogre to a railing outside an otherwise lovely—aside from its lack of bike rack, that is—Indian restaurant in Vienna, VA. With my lunch companion's sick Ridley occupying the opposite railing, the trio of cyclists who arrived after us had to look farther afield for lock-ups. We felt bad, but couldn't exactly fabricate a rack for them on the spot.

So there we all were, fly-parking, both the security of our bikes and the tidiness of suburbia suffering for it.

I only realized what a connoisseur of bike racks I'd become when I got teased for photographing them on a family vacation last week. Then I looked back through my pictures and realized I'd been snapping shots of the things on all my recent travels.

A slideshow of the racks that have caught my eye appears both below and in miniature at right. Got a shot of an out-of-the-ordinary bike rack you'd like to see included? Send it along. The diversity of designs may lead to a future post about which achieve the best mix of aesthetics and security.

Can You Spot the Bait Bike?

The Bike Theft Unit of the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) wants would-be bike thieves to think twice before making off with the shiny Schwinn propped in the alleyway or the Cannondale cable-locked to the parking meter. "Does that bike have a GPS tracker?" they want the could-be criminal to ask himself. "Will taking it land me behind bars?"

As part of its recently launched bait bike program, SFPD printed 30,000 yellow stickers aimed at making potential thieves uneasy: "Is this a bait bike?" they read.

San Francisco is far from the first city to fight its bike theft problem by planting un- or poorly-secured GPS-equipped bikes and then apprehending whoever decides to walk off with them. WashCycle reported in August 2008 that DC police used bait bikes in an attempt to combat a spate of bike thefts in the Capitol Hill area. Two unsecured bikes left on the 600 block of H Street NE were stolen five times in less than an hour!

Universities have also gone the bait bike route, with the University of Wisconsin—Madison widely credited as among the first to adopt the strategy. The UW—Madison Police Department reported a 40% decrease in bicycle thefts during the first year of bait bike deployment, and will be launching the program again to combat a rise in thefts. Other schools credit bait bikes with reductions in bike thefts of as much as 75%. Of course the publicity of the campaigns is key. Bait bikes allow police to apprehend thieves; wariness of bait bikes has the potential to deter theft before it happens.

SFPD sought to raise awareness of its bait bike program with what turned out to be a short-lived post on Craigslist. "We Have our Bait Bikes Out" read the headline above a graphic of a skeleton on a bike. The post was swiftly flagged for removal, but not before Grist snagged a screenshot.

Awareness, though, can be a double-edged sword. Thieves in Madison have gotten wise to the bait bike game, and the UW—Madison Police Department now contends with criminals who locate and remove the GPS trackers. Until stealthier GPS units hit the market, officers rely on ingenuity to conceal existing technology more effectively.

Nor is it just thieves who have it out for bait bikes. The low-hanging fruit of an unlocked bike, Christopher Moraff argues in Philadelphia Magazine, is more likely to attract the opportunist than the crime kingpin:

"If you present an absurdly easy opportunity for a petty property crime you’re probably not going to nab the Al Capone of stolen Schwinns. You’re going to get the kid on his way home from school, or the unemployed middle-aged janitor, or the homeless drug addict, who heard opportunity knock and decided to listen."

That said, an April 29 operation involving officers from SFPD, Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) police, and the Contra Costa Sheriff's Department brought in two thieves, one of whom is a repeat bike theft offender and being called one of the "top three bike thieves in the area." So perhaps the bait bike net can catch more than small fry.

Leave the Lock at Home, Says PubLock

You can gain admittance to an Ivy League school, apparently, and still not know your way around a U-lock. According to the Daily Pennsylvanian's crime reports, 23 of the 43 bike thefts on the University of Pennsylvania's campus in a given month were due to incorrect locking technique.

This statistic inspired Penn engineering students Alex Neier, Justin Starr, Joseph Polin, and Joseph Hill to design PubLock, a public bike locking system that not only eliminates the need for cyclists to lug around weighty chains or beefy U-locks but also safeguards against the incompetence factor that seems to plague a regrettable number of bike owners. PubLock is so simple and foolproof, claims publock.com, "it’s nearly impossible to use the lock incorrectly."

So how does it work? Just align the frame of your bike with an available rack, grab the handle and pull the chain around the frame and through your front wheel, and insert the handle into the locking mechanism. Then engage the lock with a tap of your personal RFID card. It's certainly faster than the process I go through with my combination of TiGr and cable!

There's lots to love about this concept. Not having to carry a lock, for one thing. And the team put a commendable amount of thought and effort into the fabrication of the system's components and the materials used. You can read all about it—or just watch a video of a professional locksmith taking an angle grinder to the chain to test it for susceptibility to cutting. The Daily Pennsylvanian trumpets PubLock's modularity and low cost. But...I've got one niggling concern born, perhaps, of overcaution bordering on paranoia: What about that rear wheel??

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!  

Crime Occurs Closer Than You Think

Writing in The Atlantic Cities, Eric Jaffe gives the highlights (or lowlights, as the case may be) of a paper in the International Journal of Sustainable Transportation. The paper reports the results of a survey of 2,000 Montreal cyclists conducted by Dea van Lierop and colleagues at McGill University in an attempt to better understand the problem of bike theft.

Jaffe extracts from the paper what he calls "the most important—and, from a perspective of urban mobility, most depressing—statistics." I list them below, but by all means go read Jaffe's full treatment:

• About half of all active cyclists have their bikes stolen.
• Few riders report bike theft, and fewer register their bikes.
• But only 2.4 percent of stolen bikes were recovered.
• Year-round cyclists are 90 percent more likely than others to have a bike stolen.
• The crime occurs closer to home than cyclists believe.
• Only 37 percent of cyclists are willing to pay for better parking.
• 76 percent of stolen bikes cost less than $500.
• 7 percent of victims never replaced their bikes.

Could be a follow-up post on the paper later, after I've had a chance to read and digest it myself.

Thieves Love Three Things

I've been mistaken for a bike thief before (subject of a future post, perhaps?), and it's an uncomfortable feeling. So when I go around tagging bikes, I do it stealthily, wary of appearing to be inspecting lock jobs with suspicious care. This means, of course, that I am sometimes not as observant as I could or should be. Case in point, courtesy of a comment received last week:

you tagged my bike without noticing.that my wheels are secured.with hose.clamps. i've had my bike locked at that spot every day for years. Colleagues have had their bikes stolen from spots right next to mine several times, but they havent taken mine. I think you need to learn a bit more about securing bikes.

Indeed I do need to learn more! About, for one thing, hose clamps and their potential to thwart would-be wheel thieves.

So here's the deal: Hose clamps are an imperfect remedy to the problem posed by the now ubiquitous quick release wheel. While it's great to be able to whip your wheel off quickly to change a flat or transport your bike on a roof rack, the possibility of speedy removal also makes your wheels attractive targets for thieves. As Bike Man Dan says, "Thieves love three things: transit stations, cable locks and quick releases."

Deploying a suitably sized hose clamp in the manner that Dan describes won't guarantee that you retain your wheels, but it may make stealing them enough of a hassle to send thieves in search of easier pickings. Seems to have worked for my anonymous commenter...

And the strategy receives Hal Ruzal's seal of approval in "Hal (and Kerri) Grade Your Bike Locking" (around the one-minute mark). The captioning on the screenshot below doesn't accurately reflect Ruzal's commentary, so I've included a more faithful transcription:

"Hose clamp here. Very nice. That keeps your thief honest. And it prevents the quick release 

from opening without someone having either a screwdriver or an 8 mm wrench here to push 

the hose clamp up."

I'm not ready to go the hose clamp route myself yet, but I did learn something from rewatching Hal (and being chastised for not noticing the commenter's hose clamps): Inspectors of bike locks shouldn't be shy. Hell, Hal straight up removes someone's saddle at ~1:40 just to show that he can! 

They Can't Take That Away from Me

My life took a dark turn in the months after my bike got stolen. I bought a "Death to bike thieves" sticker and displayed it prominently on my replacement ride. I started sporting black nail polish and a short, punk haircut.  

I got piercings and launched a blog (you're looking at it) to channel what I called my "post-theft fury." 

Had a vengeful spirit consumed me? Was I descending into a joyless abyss of bitterness and hatred and suspicion? Had the thief robbed me of the delight I once derived from biking? 

No.

A March email from my boyfriend began:

if you had an engraving somewhere on your bike that could only take 14 characters, what would you want it to say?   

His suggestion (he was sticking with my sticker's theme):

Death Thieves 

I answered:

Maybe "Thief beware," but I kind of don't want thieves to be the dictating force behind everything I do (or don't do) with my bike... Maybe something having to do with the freedom biking makes possible?

A dozen emails later we'd settled on something to do with the need to breathe deeply and be happy and relax. I had no idea what was up, and my fondness for surprises kept me from inquiring, but before the week was out a pair of Lizard Skins lock-on grips arrived in the mail, bearing a personalized and much needed message:

So now when I cruise the capital on my bike—newly gripped and more precious to me than ever—I glance down at my handlebars, inhale positivity, and feel the tension fade. 

You will not get the better of me, bike thieves.