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What Happens to Stolen Bicycles?

blog.priceonomics.com

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Re: What Happens to Stolen Bicycles?

#191

Post by tadfisher »

fghh45sdfhr3 wrote: post #180
frankus wrote: post #81

Bike theft seems like one of those quality-of-life crimes (like graffiti and coercive squeegee-monkeys) that's begging for some kind of creative enforcement strategy. - If there's an open-air bike market at 7th and Market, it seems like you could use some of the same strategies that have been used to shut down open-air drug markets. - Police in the greater Vancouver area have had a lot of success with bait cars, but…

Bike theft seems like one of those quality-of-life crimes (like graffiti and coercive squeegee-monkeys) that's begging for some kind of creative enforcement strategy. Or just plain old boring regular enforcement, like Germany and Japan have, which is how they end up with a far lower crime rate than the US or the UK for example. (They also have a better social safety net, that's part of their low crime rates too.)

Violent crime, maybe, but bike theft is pretty common in Japanese cities. It's not so organized as it is in the West, but usually drunk people who "borrow" bikes to get home.

Re: What Happens to Stolen Bicycles?

#192

Post by Johngibb »

Retric wrote: post #109
enraged_camel wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you tell if a bike you are buying is stolen? It would be pretty easy for a bike thief to post an ad on Craigslist saying they are selling their used bike. >>Tangentially, and pardon my ignorance, I'm not a biker: I can't understand people who shell out thousands of dollars for a bike, are these so much better than a $500 one? It makes a huge difference. More expensive bikes are built from lighter and stronger…

I would argue it's often more about falling into the same trap as 'audiophiles' as it is about direct benefits. Few people notice the added weight from drinking 2lb of water but people spend hundreds of dollars shaving 1/10th of that from their bike.

In my experience, it stops making a difference once you have to carry a 20 lb kryptonite chain to lock it. I just spent all that money on a light bike, and now it's 20 pounds heavier. I hate bike thieves.

Just had my bike stolen last week in NYC

Re: What Happens to Stolen Bicycles?

#193

Post by ffn »

How about a bike with a combo lock built into its gears so that all the gears will only spin if the correct combo is given. The built-in combo lock can also be rigged to detonate some wired-in explosive if someone attempts to forcefully remove it.

Re: What Happens to Stolen Bicycles?

#194

Post by jzwinck »

stcredzero wrote: post #186
DannoHung wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about a pressurized U-lock that releases a neon-pink paint cloud if the cylinder or restraining bar is cut-through? I guess the trick would be making it get on the thief and all over the bicycle. The best would be if it also stank to high heaven.

You can also directly attack the economics of bike resale. Make an inexpensive bike with a combined drive shaft, shifting mechanism, and lock mechanism internal to the frame. Put it together in such a way that it's quite possible to disable the lock, but impossible to do that without rendering the bicycle inoperable. Then, instead of selling these bikes, one leases them. It would be impossible to sell such a bike wit…

Puma (the shoe people) sold a bike for several years with a lock comprising part of the frame. If the lock were cut, it would make the bike frame unstable, theoretically discouraging theft. I don't know if it was successful in any objective way, but it was an interesting idea: http://www.bikeoff.org/design_resource/DR_bikes_examples_pum...

Re: What Happens to Stolen Bicycles?

#195

Post by DenisM »

buffportion wrote: post #178
DannoHung wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about a pressurized U-lock that releases a neon-pink paint cloud if the cylinder or restraining bar is cut-through? I guess the trick would be making it get on the thief and all over the bicycle. The best would be if it also stank to high heaven.

That's great, until you lose your key

That argument applies to any effective antitheft device. Shall we take it you're against all effective antitheft devices in general?

Re: What Happens to Stolen Bicycles?

#196

Post by Dove »

agumonkey wrote: post #158
Dove wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, it's time-related and everyone sees it. Deeper comment threads have a timer that prevents comments for several minutes. It's to give people arguing with each other time to cool off.

Are those rules written somewhere ? I like the tree pruning effect of this one

http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html has some of them, but not nearly all of them.

Re: What Happens to Stolen Bicycles?

#197

Post by aidian »

ljf wrote: post #118
ChuckMcM wrote: post #93

I love priceonomics, every time I read one of their articles I learn something new (for example I didn't realize you could exchange a stolen bike for sex). Approaching this as an economics problem seems like a good approach. I think if bike manufacturers built in ways to uniquely identify bikes, and those idents were economically infeasible to remove, then you could do a bitcoin style distributed database of the curr…

Most (all?) bikes have a serial number stamped on the bottom of the 'bottom bracket' the part that the pedals go into. These serial numbers are unique per bike brand, but not universally unique. The serial is pretty hard to remove, without it's removal being obvious to anyone that looks, though the brand can be removed or changed - if that happens the serial wouldn't show as stolen. If there was a lookup for serials…

JB Weld to fill in the old serial numbers, then use number punches to put in new serial.

Re: What Happens to Stolen Bicycles?

#198

Post by alttag »

frankus wrote: post #81

Bike theft seems like one of those quality-of-life crimes (like graffiti and coercive squeegee-monkeys) that's begging for some kind of creative enforcement strategy. - If there's an open-air bike market at 7th and Market, it seems like you could use some of the same strategies that have been used to shut down open-air drug markets. - Police in the greater Vancouver area have had a lot of success with bait cars, but…

I've done some work with a local (university) police force that used bait bikes. They'd attach a GPS device, secure it with a poor lock, and wait a couple of days. I went with them once to track down where the stolen bike was parked. Every once in a while they'd land on a ring selling all kinds of stuff on Ebay, but that was less common.

Part of their trouble was, being an underfunded public agency, their bike wasn't of the expensive sort, so I got the impression they were seeing diminishing returns over time as the bike became less desirable. They did this with laptops too, although their "bait" laptop no longer worked, and was really old. I could never get anyone to steal it.

I don't know what happened when the case(s) were turned over to the D.A.

When I was in Japan, the bikes-stealing dynamic was a bit different: the most common place to find your bike was at the nearest train station. The typical thief seemed to be running late for the train, and would borrow whatever was available.

Re: What Happens to Stolen Bicycles?

#200

Post by pyoung »

checker wrote: post #167
jseliger wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you could make possession of stolen property (the bike) a major crime with prison and financial punishment and you weaken the demand side of things. In legal terms, you'd have a problem with proportionality —that is, the idea that the punishment needs to fit the crime. This is partially a problem with fairness and partially a problem with incentives: if you give someone the same punishment for, say, stealing a bi…

Your example doesn't apply because death is the ceiling. It's impossible to kill someone twice, so ultimately it makes no difference to the criminal. However, if the criminal gets 5 years for stealing a bike, and 10 years for beating someone up, the criminal might be swayed by 5 years vs 15 years. I can see the situation where the criminal thinks "I'm already probably going to jail, might as well decrease my chances…

You are not taking into account concurrent sentencing. So if the punishment for stealing a bike was 5, and if assault was also 5, the guy would only serve 5. Theoretically at least.
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