91–100 of 121 posts
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My Van Moof bike has this, they even offer an additional service where they go and get the bike back for you
Does this service involve very large men all wearing black and ear pieces?
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Fwiw, the police helped me successfully recover my kid’s stolen bike and arrested the thief/seller as soon as I ID’d our bike at the “meet-up.” It’s easy to over generalize.
YMMV - I see zero help with home burglaries let alone stolen bikes. Depends on a lot of factors, just sucks you pay taxes for no benefits.
I have an unusual folding bike. It's a Bike Friday Tikit, and basically has a Steal Me sign attached to it. But it also can be folded extremely rapidly and covered with a custom built-in cover so it looks like, oh, a tuba case. My anti-theft strategy is: my bike has never had a lock. This forces me to fold and cover it and take it in with me wherever I go. Office buildings, federal buildings in DC (really), offices i…
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So the police didn't do any detective work, didn't help with the sting operation, and they didn't punish the thief. It seems like it'd be more fruitful to get a few of your friends and solve the problem yourself. It's not like the thief is going to go to the cops.
One of the hallmarks of a justice system is the presence of a neutral judge and a defense attorney. Mob violence is most certainly not just.
I locked it up next to a bike path, with lots of other bikes. I made sure to fold the handlebar down so it couldn't possibly interfere with passing cyclists. I met my Dutch friend and had wonderful pedalo journey around the city. Utrecht is great, you should visit.
When I got back it was gone. There was a young woman nearby, in tears. Her bike was also gone. My memory's not what it used to be: had I, in fact, left it somewhere else? But I then found what remained of my lock: a cleanly sliced 5cm long section.
It wasn't insured but I thought I'd report it to the police anyway. Always good to have up-to-date crime statistics! And it's unusual enough in terms of model and colour that maybe I'd get it back one day. The police were polite and spoke excellent English. However, a tourist reporting a stolen bike apparently required assistance from a second, and then a third, member of staff. It took over twenty-five minutes of wrangling with computers and ring binders to establish that I needed to have an in-person interview to report the theft. No, none of the three staff were able to do that now. I'd have to book one. When was the next available interview slot? Not until next week, after my departure from the city.
Later that night I was morosely googling "bike crime utrecht". Cheering myself up with bit of confirmation bias. Despite not reading Dutch I was able to figure out from the local government's website that there is a depot to which the authorities remove illegally-parked bikes. Not only that, it has a web interface where you can search for your bike. I do wonder why the police didn't mention this possibility during our lengthy encounter.
My bike was, of course, there. I sheepishly collected it, paying the nominal fee, and failing to dispute the "evidence" that they provide in their computer system (a photo of a sign prohibiting bike parking. I went back to the scene of the crime later; the sign was nowhere near, and was even on the other side of the road).
Moral of the story: use one of the many free municipal bike parks when you're in the Netherlands.
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Maybe it's a Hamburg thing then. Everyone I know who has tried to report a crime here in Hamburg has been interrogated and harassed by the police
there's a huge difference between catching the thieves in the act and trying to get your bike back afterwards. Actually, I have experienced both cases: Once my brother saw how thieves were trying to steal a bike and informed the police, who acted. Another time I saw my stolen bike basically 300m next to a police station and went there and everything they said was: We don't have policemen here who have time for this.…
Glad this had a happy ending. I'm still torn up about my own bike, stolen in broad daylight. It was my fault - it wasn't locked up. It was an old bonded aluminum frame Trek, it squeaked when you bore down on it but it was upgraded and tweaked just the way I like it. I haven't felt the same about cycling since.
(I didn't even try the police. A lot of bikes got stolen there, and they were not going to spend their time on this sort of crime.)
It wasn't particularly great, just an off-brand mountain bike, but I loved it. I had a more intimate relationship with it than I've had with any car I've ever driven. There's just something about getting a bike set up exactly the way you like it, where it fits you and your style of riding just perfectly.
I wish bike manufacturers would start including GPS devices into the frames of high-end bikes. The devices would need some access to insert SIMs and charge them and then it should act as a deterrent.
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This is entirely dependent on what city you live in and who you elect to local leadership positions. My brother's bike was stolen in college when he lived in Logan Utah. As a non-native he was shocked to find that the cops put out a description of the stolen bike immediately and it was spotted and returned within hours. I believe an arrest was also made. There's no reason we just need to accept that you can steal any…
Logan is >80% Mormon. Indeed, when you have high-trust, high-IQ, low-crime demographics, it becomes a lot more practical to address property crimes - there aren't very many of them, and there aren't many serious crimes higher up the todo list. It has some, but not all, to do with the people in power. The demographics of a city like NYC are such that you would have to 10x police expenditures and radically expand polic…
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This is entirely dependent on what city you live in and who you elect to local leadership positions. My brother's bike was stolen in college when he lived in Logan Utah. As a non-native he was shocked to find that the cops put out a description of the stolen bike immediately and it was spotted and returned within hours. I believe an arrest was also made. There's no reason we just need to accept that you can steal any…
Logan is >80% Mormon. Indeed, when you have high-trust, high-IQ, low-crime demographics, it becomes a lot more practical to address property crimes - there aren't very many of them, and there aren't many serious crimes higher up the todo list. It has some, but not all, to do with the people in power. The demographics of a city like NYC are such that you would have to 10x police expenditures and radically expand polic…
I think high trust and low population density has a lot more to do with it.