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.]

"As though the soul of a man had been filmed"

It's fitting that, with Oscar season upon us, I just watched the winner of the 1949 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film: Vittoria De Sica's Ladri di biciclette. Variously translated as The Bicycle Thief or Bicycle Thieves, the black-and-white classic opens as Antonio Ricci, a jobless father of two, at last finds work—work that requires him to own a bicycle—only to have his oft-pawned Fides (I gather that this is a made-up brand) stolen his first day out. What unfolds in the film's 93 minutes is a drama that was heaped with superlative praise on the occasion of its re-release in 1972:

It wasn't Miller or Brando or a hankering for a bracing dose of Italian neorealism, though, that prompted me to check out from my local library the Criterion Collection's double-disc presentation of De Sica's masterpiece. I watched Ladri di biciclette after reading that the founder of the Portland-based band Bike Thief named his quintet of folk/alt-rockers after the film—stole its title, if you will. 

I also regarded the movie as a possible answer to a comment made by a mathematician with whom I was corresponding for my day job. I was questioning this fellow via email about a lectureship he once held, and I suppose he decided to investigate—or at least Google—his interrogator. The scholar's eventual (and quite lengthy) reply to my message began:

Reading your blog gives me the illusion of a personal acquaintance—from the intensity with which you are present even when writing about a subject as mundane as bicycle theft.

"Mundane"? "Dull and ordinary"? Bike theft is, sadly, the latter, but it is not the former. This is the stuff of high drama! Since when does dull material an Oscar earn?

How about "Wheel Leashes"?

Experts agree. In all but the most crime-free of neighborhoods, a cable lock provides piss-poor security against bicycle theft.

When Hal Ruzal reviewed bike locks for Bicycling magazine (see this post) he declared all cable locks equally inadequate and cut through a $30 model with a pocket-sized pair of wire cutters.

When I registered my (since stolen) bike with the Arlington County Police Department back in 2011, my decal arrived in the mail with the enclosure shown at left. Cable locks, you can see if your eyesight is sharp enough, "are not sufficient to deter theft." Exclamation point.

Might as well not even call them locks.

For to refer to the flimsy things as "locks" (noun pl.) makes it easier to be lulled into thinking one can "lock" (transitive verb) one's bike with one of them.

And this, as I discovered the hard way, is just not true.

So, since language has the power to influence thought, I suggest we re-name these glorified wires. The new moniker should reflect the reality, i.e. that while cables do have a place in a responsible bicyclist's ride security system, they should never be used solo. Something like "wheel leashes," perhaps? Suggestions?

After a 20-Year Wait...

Within a few days of my bike being stolen, when I hadn't tracked it down on Craigslist or spotted some shady character riding it around town, I resigned myself to its loss. But a story in The Local out of Sweden last week indicates that I may have given up hope too hastily.

Police reunited Karina Murén of Gävle in northern Sweden with the first three-speed she got in middle school, a bike that was stolen twenty years ago. Despite the bike's color having been altered during its time away from its rightful owner, the frame number was enough to identify the two-wheeler as Murén's.

Find and record those serial numbers, people, and never say "never" when it comes to stolen bike recovery.

I Stole Your Bike to Hit Festivals Soon

Thanks to Marcos for tipping me off to the December DCist post about a new documentary in the works. Southern Maryland brothers Christian, Stephon, and Joshua White shadowed an unnamed but supposedly quite active bike thief around Washington, D.C., filming his actions for a movie they're calling I Stole Your Bike. Check out the trailer:

There may be, as the Washington Area Bicyclist Association's Greg Billing says in the Fox 5 News story about the documentary, "a fine line between glorifying bike theft and using it as an educational tool," but the White brothers, who say their film "will reveal how to 100% secure your bike from future bike thieves," believe they're "going to aid a lot of people in the end."

I Stole Your Bike is slated to be finished this spring.

Some Hot New Bike Thieves in the Capital Region?

The Washington Post ran a story about bike theft on December 21. The statistics it cited are pretty eye-popping: Bike thefts were up 63% (from 2012 levels) in 2013 in Arlington County, up 19% in Fairfax and 43% in Alexandria.

Part of the increase can be attributed to the hike in the popularity of biking in and around the nation's capital—the Post story reported that census data indicates that the percentage of bike commuters in the city increased 30% from 2011 to 2012—but residents suspect there's something else afoot. The Post quotes Jared Janowiak, who recovered his stolen bike through a sting operation: "One conjecture among bike racers is that there’s some hot new bike thieves in the region."

So lock your bikes up smart, DC and NOVA cyclists, and, if your bike has already gone missing (my condolences!), check out the photos of bikes recovered by the Metropolitan Police Department, sample below:

Don't Supply the Demand: Vet Your Seller

The Schwinn I bought from Michael Birnbaum

Everyone from whom I have ever even almost purchased a bike has been a journalist. There was Olga Khazan, who covers health for The Atlantic, whose email address still auto-completes in my gmail because of the correspondence we had years ago about a bike she was selling on Craigslist. And when in November 2010 I did ultimately buy a Craigslist ride, it was a white Schwinn Washington Post soon-to-be-Berlin-correspondent Michael Birnbaum was selling on behalf of his wife (or girlfriend—I forget which) who had gone to Germany ahead of him.

How do I know these sellers' occupations? Because I Googled them. Even back in 2010, when I'd never had a bike stolen (and had practically forgotten how to ride one), I knew that Craigslist was awash in stolen cycles. So as I perused the bikes-for-sale listings on the Washington, DC Craigslist, I tried to steer clear of stolen property and gauge the likelihood that the various sellers were thieves.

Easier said than done. At the time I assumed that anyone with multiple bikes for sale was a shady character. Now, though, I know that there are enthusiasts who rehab bikes for fun and could, conceivably, have a few ready for purchase at the same time. There are also those who own veritable stables of bikes and who might, to earn a few hundred bucks or free up some storage space (for the latest two-wheeled acquisition(s), perhaps?), look to unload a couple well-used rides at one go.

As a conscientious would-be purchaser of a used bike, you really have to play it by ear, trust your instincts, and, to the extent possible, vet your seller. Let's look at a couple ads, found on the Washington, DC Craigslist on December 19, 2013.

I'm not prepared to say for sure that this Cannondale is stolen, but I'd bet that it has not been well cared for. The ad shows no evidence of either knowledge of or love for the bicycle. The seller provides no details—the bike's size? hello?—and only a picture so blurry you can hardly read the brand name. And that crass appeal to last-minute Christmas consumerism... I'd pass this one by.

Check out the contrast:

This seller has not only lovingly posed the Spearfish, but also furnished a comprehensive rundown of its features. Note also that s/he cites a reason for giving up this "dream" of a ride. (In case the print's too small for you, the ad ends with "Upgrading to a carbon bike.") It's a credible explanation.

This sort of thoroughness and authenticity can be faked, of course, but the Spearfish seller also passed my second test. When I replied to the above ad asking what assurance the seller could give that s/he had acquired the bike legitimately, I got a link to where the seller bought the frame (supposedly, anyway), and this: "Other than that you'll probably have to take my word."

Not as doubt-dispelling as a sales receipt, perhaps, but I like what I didn't detect in the Spearfish seller's reply: offense. Here's how another seller responded when I asked how s/he came to possess the single bike wheel advertised on Craigslist: "I assume you have no intention of apologizing for insinuating that this wheel was stolen." 

Seems to me that a non-criminal would recognize the theft of bikes and bike parts as a problem and be grateful that at least some buyers do their part to avoid supporting it...

How to Foil Creepo

In its circa 1974 short How to Protect Your Bike, Sid Davis Productions relies on a strategy beloved by the authors of my grade school health and home economics textbooks: enumeration. This isn't the "seven dietary guidelines," though—I forget what those were, incidentally—but five fingers to remind you how to protect your bike:

To summarize (in case that 1970s camp was too much for you to endure the film's full 12 minutes):

(1) Lock your bike 

(2) in a wise location 

(3) with a good chain and lock 

(4) chained around something strong and through both wheels and frame and 

(5) register it in every way you can.

The recommendations hold up pretty well after all these years, and since we haven't quite perfected that secret alarm the narrator fantasizes about (11:10), you best make sure you keep them well in mind.

"Bikes Thieves Get Yiked"

If you're perplexed by the title of this post, you're not the only one. It's from the official YikeBike promo video, and must—I'm relying on context clues here—mean something like "bike thieves get foiled" or "bike thieves got nothing on you." Take a look and see for yourself: 

Motorists should start commuting by YikeBike to avoid parking tickets and gridlock and high prices at the pump, that much is clear, and cyclists should swap their pedal-powered, too readily plunderable rides for the "world's first super light folding electric bike" because its portability means they can take it into the office or restaurant with them? 

I, for one, am not sold. I like pedaling too much to be satisfied zooming around limbs immobile. When it comes to foldable transportation, I think I'm more of a Brompton girl.

Cuff It?

As I put together Tuesday's post about bike lock anti-theft guarantees, I came across a lock not only backed by a wow-that-smacks-of-manufacturer-confidence $3500 warranty but also begging me to either start a game of cops and robbers or get my kink on.

Simply put: Master Lock Street Cuffs look like no bike lock I'd ever seen, and I wanted to know more.

Master Lock of course makes the cuffs sound great: hardened steel laminate, no fixed anchor point for leverage, nowhere for a would-be thief to wedge a jack or a pry bar...

Lovely, and at a mere $65.41, I was beginning to wonder if I needed to get myself a pair. Perusing reviews put a bit of a damper on my enthusiasm, though. (As it tends to do; are there any hater-less products out there?) I'm not ready to write off the cuffs, but seeing as I already have a good lock, I'm not rushing out to buy a pair either. If you're smitten as I initially was by the idea of securing your bike with steel bracelets, here are some factors to weigh first:

• Users report that the tubular locks—one per cuff—are tricky: sometimes they won't lock, sometimes they won't unlock.
• The center links can supposedly be cut or popped with readily-available tools.
• It's great for affixing your bike to a parking meter, but in some locations suitable anchors are scarce.
• And, to quote (errors and all) a review on mtbr.com: "Lets be honest. Its a lock. Some people take pride in defeating locks, so its a universal weekness."