Make a Lock Out of the Frame

Maybe you've seen the "Gumby bike." Photographs of and stories about this bike-that-can-do-the-pretzel hit the internet back in 2010. I've never seen one of Kevin Scott's bendable bikes locked to itself around a pole, though. As far as I can tell, the concept never became a mass-produced reality. The idea of a bike with an integrated locking mechanism did not die, however, as evidenced by two new bike designs that have come to my attention.

First, there's DENNY, TEAGUE X Sizemore Bicycle's final bike design for Oregon Manifest's Bike Design Project, which partners design firms with bicycle craftsmen to create the Ultimate Urban Utility Bike. The design includes a handlebar quick lock. Check it out starting at ~00:43.

Then there's the Yerka Project, which is promising the world's "first unstealable bike." Three Chilean engineering students, themselves past victims of bike theft, decided to take a novel approach to the problem. "Every lock can be broken leaving the bike intact," explains Yerka's website. "That's why we decided to make a lock out of the frame. The only way to steal it is to break the lock, which implies breaking the bike." The team claims that the bike they've designed "maintains the slick design of an urban bike"—unlike, say, a foldable bike or a clunky rental—and takes a mere 20 seconds to secure. Think they can make it happen? Watch the promo:
  

Both DENNY and Yerka's bike, of course, are vulnerable to wheel theft, which will be the subject of a future post. Stay tuned.

*Thanks to David Lovit for sending me the DENNY video.

"Dear Douchebag Bike Thief..."

Had a bike stolen and want to simultaneously vent and maybe, just maybe, get a message to whomever nabbed it? Pen a note—preferably using colorful language—and post it at the scene of the crime. Olgi Freyre did so back in November, and now 23-year-old Briton Aaron Rush is making news for taking a similar tack.

Rush's grey Giant went missing from outside his place of work the day after he started commuting by bike rather than on foot.

Soon after discovering the theft—even before checking the tracker that he, a veteran victim of bike theft, had installed—Rush posted several copies of the now famous "Dear Douchebag Bike Thief" note on the rack where he'd locked the bike:

Personally I would have omitted the detail about the tracker... Rush got an initial reading indicating that the bike remained in the neighborhood where it was stolen, but, as he told the Daily Mail, the tracker has since either been broken or turned off. Rush, who lacks the funds to replace the Giant and has learned that his insurance will not cover it, currently commutes by longboard.

*Thanks to Karen Carter for tipping me off to this story :)

"I was the demand part of the bike theft black market"

Most folks engaged in the effort to combat bike theft took action after having a bike stolen. That's certainly the case with me. For Detroit resident Seth Archambault, though, the impetus was different: unwitting possession of stolen property. 

Sitting at a coffee shop one afternoon, Archambault was approached by a stranger. "That's my stolen bike you're riding," the stranger said, indicating the red Yokota locked to a nearby meter. Archambault had bought the bicycle from a secondhand bike shop shortly after moving to Detroit from Philadelphia. He had been riding it for two months at the time of the coffee shop encounter.

It didn't come to blows there in the Urban Bean. The former owner told Archambault to keep the bike, taking blame for its theft (he hadn't locked it up) and saying that he was "happy that it ended up with somebody who was enjoying it." Thrilled as Archambault was to remain in possession of the bike, the exchange distressed him. He worried about his money—he'd paid for the bike, after all—financing the bike black market, incentivizing more bike theft.

"If you’re someone serious about being a positive part of the community—as I am," Archambault wrote in a blog post, "then you must take a serious look on the impact you are having on the community, and what you can do to change things."

Now, as he explained in a follow-up blog post, Archambault ultimately determined that no bike thief profited from his bike purchase, but that comforting revelation didn't stop him from trying to effect change.

Last week, on the one-year anniversary of his arrival in Detroit, Archambault launched Detroit Bike Blacklist, his attempt to facilitate reunions between stolen bikes and their rightful owners. The concept's a simple one, as Archambault tells it: "Bike stolen? Press a button, upload a photo, get an email if/when it’s found. That’s it."

Archambault has a "devious underlying plan," though, as he explains on the site's About page (and in this Detroit Free Press video). Archambault believes that bike theft is a symptom of an underlying problem, one we're not yet knowledgeable enough to solve.

"I want to understand bike theft, the systemic causes of it," Archambault writes, "and I want to gather that data and make it publicly accessible to inform a larger discussion."

Update: Emily Finch's New Cargo Bike

As BTB reported, Portland mom Emily Finch lost her beloved (and famous) cargo bike to theft in November. While Finch—known to transport her six children by bike—made do with a cargo trike and a Brompton for months, recovery eventually looked unlikely enough that she commissioned local outfit Microfiets to build her a custom ride.

She saw the fully assembled bike for the first time on Thursday, took it for a test ride outside Portland bike shop/venue/bar Velo Cult, and was, by all accounts, thrilled.

No word on Finch's strategy for safeguarding the new family vehicle...

Even If Your Mom Were a Villain...

Six-year-old Roxy Thompson of Portland, OR, made news last week when she penned a yard sign note to whoever had relieved her dad of "about half a dozen custom road bikes." (Wait, does the man own so many bikes that he can't even remember them all??) Having already offered her bereft father her life's savings, Roxy sought, via the yard sign, to guilt the thieves into reversing the wrong they'd committed. I love how she considered the possibility of villainous mothers and concluded that even they would frown on their offspring's perpetration of criminal acts: 

BikePortland.org picked up Roxy's story, declaring the spirited girl the personification of "the widespread disdain of bike thieves in Portland these days." After recapping Roxy's reaction to her father's loss, BikePortland news editor Michael Andersen and coauthor Jonathan Maus offered readers a rundown of relevant Rose City facts. I learned a thing or two: that police often have trouble obtaining the evidence and search warrants necessary to dismantle chop shops, for instance, and that even a locked garage/U-lock combo can't always deter Portland bike thieves. Andersen and Maus also mentioned the Portland-based band Bike Thief I cited in a January post and floated an idea that has been on my mind recently, too: a bike theft summit.

This prompted my fourth ever tweet:

Might something come of this? Stay tuned...

Stolen Bike Hunt

From Toronto to Texas, victims of bike theft are turning to Facebook to increase the chances of recovering their stolen property. 

As the National Post reported, Christian Garnette reclaimed his fixie within hours of its theft because he posted a photo of it to the Facebook page of a local shop and asked his fellow fixed gear enthusiasts to keep their eyes out.

And both the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and Houston's KHOU TV (video since removed—sorry) have picked up stories about Facebook groups expressly created to crowdsource the recovery of stolen bikes.

KHOU spoke to Spencer Elliott of Stolen Bike Hunt - Houston, "a message board for anyone who has a bike stolen." Besides encouraging victims of bike theft to post photos and descriptions of their stolen rides, Elliott offers reminders about how to prevent theft.

The Facebook search feature turns up many groups similar to Elliott's, from Cleveland Stolen Bike Alerts to Stolen Bikes La Crosse County to RVA Stolen Bicycle Forum. Consider joining (or "liking"—which action is appropriate depends on how the page has been set up) a Facebook-based bike recovery effort in your area or, if none exists, starting one.

(I just liked Missing Bikes-DC and Stolen Bikes in Washington DC, Maryland, and Virginia, though neither page seems to be seeing much action. Looks like, in my town, Tumblr is the social media of choice for getting the word out about stolen bikes. Hmmm.)

The First Step

I've been known to complain about the United States' relative lack of slick bike infrastructure, and my impulse would be to classify Norway's Gulskogen Bicycle Hotel with the Eindhoven Hovenring in the category of bike-related-feats-of-engineering-we'll-never-halfway-replicate-stateside, but... Yes, the Gulskogen Bicycle Hotel has that concrete tongue-shaped ramp that spills out from a circular wooden border framing a metal doorway and that porous filigree pattern that sprawls across the metal doorway and gable wall (Inhabitat gushes over the "intricate filigree facade"), but...Washington, D.C. has Bikestation.

Both the Norwegian bicycle hotel and Bikestation Washington DC use a double-decker pull-out system of racks to accommodate more than 100 bikes (Norway: 134, United States: 140). The design of each facility took its surroundings into consideration. And both bikes-only parking garages aim to keep my favorite form of two-wheeled transportation both sheltered from the elements and safe from thieves.

Though area cyclists whose travels revolve around a metro other than Union Station will have to content themselves with $120/year, subject-to-availability bicycle lockers for now, District Department of Transportation Director Gabe Klein says he wants to erect modular versions of Bikestation around the city. Watch out, Norway :)
  

ABUS: Obsessed with Testing and Innovation

Maybe I just patronize all the wrong retailers, but I neither own an ABUS lock nor know much about ABUS, the German firm that supposedly invented the U-lock. Thanks to the folks at D.C. bike shop BicycleSPACE (where—full disclosure—I bought my Surly Ogre), though, I got a peek this week into how ABUS puts its bike locks through the paces. 

BicycleSPACE cofounder Erik Kugler toured ABUS headquarters with, apparently, a film crew in tow:

By all means watch all seven videos from the trip—the entire playlist is embedded above—but if you're interested primarily in purposeful destruction (or at least attempted destruction) feel free to skip ahead to the testing videos, in which ABUS employees use specially constructed machines to try to smash, twist, and pull their locks into submission:

From this I gather that, where U-locks are concerned, (1) soft core is better than case hardened and (2) square shackles and a two-sided lock mechanisms offer more protection than, respectively, round and one-sided ones. Hmmm.

@isitstolen

To my (admittedly measly) seven Twitter followers, don't get your hopes up. I don't have a slew of pithy aphorisms up my sleeve. I only signed up so I could try out @isitstolen.

Post a serial number to @isitstolen and a bot will run it against the Bike Index database and tweet back to you whether or not there's a hit.

Here's what happened when I tweeted the serial number of my stolen Cannondale. (The duplicate entry is an artifact of the recent Bike Index/Stolen Bike Registry merger.)

So... 

1. Before you buy a used bike, run the serial number (either via Twitter or in the search bar at the top of the Bike Index page). (Can't find the serial number? Get help here and here.)
2. Sign Project 529's petition urging Craigslist and eBay to require serial numbers in online listings for used bikes. This will make it easier for you to check those digits before buying.
3. Register your bike(s) if you haven't already (!).

When the Rack's the Weak Link

I've so far confined myself to photographing bike racks, but I might start vigorously shaking them. Before I entrust my bike to one of the tubular waves, at any rate. It's not unprecedented, apparently, for a lone and not exactly muscle-bound criminal to rip a bike rack from the sidewalk. It happened in the East Rock neighborhood of New Haven, Connecticut, in late June:

Now I know nothing about bike rack installation, but in-ground mounts seem preferable to surface ones, and "Drop In Anchors...for concrete installation" sound good.

When in doubt about a rack's integrity, affix your bike to it such that even if a thief wrenches the thing from the ground, s/he will still have to break your lock or, short of that, drag the whole bloody bike/lock/rack unit back to her/his lair.