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What Happens to Stolen Bicycles?

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Re: What Happens to Stolen Bicycles?

#211

Post by greggman »

When I was a kid (GET OFF MY LAWN!!!)

We used to be able to register our bikes with the police department. They'd stamp a registration number onto the frame of the bike using lettered taps and a hammer. The only way to take off the registration is to either file it down or cover it over, in either case a clear indication the bike is stolen.

I got a bike stolen 3 times. Twice I got one back when the police found it (once the bike had upgrades too. Better front fork, better grips and 2nd rider peddels had been added)

Anyway, I'm sure someone will cite "budget cuts" but I certainly wish they still registered bikes. It seems like in a city like SF there are enough cyclists, revenues from registering the bikes could pay for a few bike police.

Re: What Happens to Stolen Bicycles?

#212

Post by lancewiggs »

danielweber wrote: post #142
ethermal wrote: post #135

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. Then using RFID or similar technology, you could embed a RFID tag somewhere in the frame. Then allow someone to report a stolen bike with a police report, very similar to a stolen vehicle report and then using remote scanners you could scan for stolen bikes very easi…

Can you make an RFID tag that you can embed in the bike such that it's easy to scan at a small distance, but also hard for the thieves to fry it or remove it? Because in order to be successful it would be to be standardized and if standardized the thieves would fry it if easy.

http://Taggle.com.au (I'm an investor) has a small device that allows remote tracking of assets like bicycles for years without an external power supply. The tiny devices broadcast a low powered wide spectrum ping every 20 mins to 1 hour and very smart receivers triangulate to provide coordinates. The transmitters can also send data, generally a meter reading or if a secure element is broken.

Taggle Systems are focussing first on remote reading of water meters and other water utility use cases, but once networks are in place then tracking bikes will be doable.

Re: What Happens to Stolen Bicycles?

#213

Post by stcredzero »

jzwinck wrote: post #194
stcredzero wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Making the bike frame unstable isn't strong enough. People still ride unstable bikes. A fabrication method that involves squeezing spring loaded parts into a tube could serve to make the bike inoperable when dismantled, even to the point of immobilizing the rear wheel.

Re: What Happens to Stolen Bicycles?

#214

Post by roguecoder »

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's a problem with cars right now. The combination of a wallet key, a spare at home and always being able to go back to the dealer make it not-that-big-a-deal, in my experience.

Re: What Happens to Stolen Bicycles?

#215

Post by stcredzero »

tkresident wrote: post #206
fghh45sdfhr3 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Having had two regular bicycles stolen over ten years in Tokyo, I would disagree that the problem is non-existent in Japan, though street crime is indeed relatively rare. Bicycles are commonly used by the majority of people. Authorities need staff dedicated to keeping streets near stations from getting clogged up with secured bikes. An unsecured bicycle near a station might be used as a free ride home by a drunken sa…

Much of the fabric of American society has dissolved. This is a kind of social capital which is very powerful and hard to quantify. (It's also threatening to certain governments for precisely this reason.)

Re: What Happens to Stolen Bicycles?

#216

Post by wiredfool »

pmahoney wrote: post #207
davidw wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heard a story, but I have no idea whether it's true: bike shop in San Francisco leaves very shiny, high end bike outside. Thief hops on bike, heads down hill to make a quick getaway. Thief soon discovers that the bicycle's brake cables are not connected. CRASH.

I believe that it's illegal to booby-trap one's house, and I've heard of (apocryphal?) cases of burglars suing homeowners for injuries sustained during a burglary... I imagine such a brake-less bike would fall in that category.

Thieves should avoid stealing fixies then. Especially from the top of a hill.

Re: What Happens to Stolen Bicycles?

#217

Post by roguecoder »

Cass wrote: post #165
ethermal wrote: post #135

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. Then using RFID or similar technology, you could embed a RFID tag somewhere in the frame. Then allow someone to report a stolen bike with a police report, very similar to a stolen vehicle report and then using remote scanners you could scan for stolen bikes very easi…

The US already proportionally has the most prisoners out of any country in the world, and I'm wary of any solution that includes making that problem worse. That kind of thing has giant socioeconomic costs and, looking at the crime rates, doesn't seem to work at making the country safer. I just don't think that finding yet another reason to put a whole bunch of people in prison (average cost per month between $2000 an…

Actually, it has made the country significantly safer: http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/glance/cv2.cfm

Whether or not the decline in violent crime justifies the rise in imprisonment and the decline in prison standards, or whether there might be other ways to achieve the same declines are different questions. But the United States has become significantly safer over the last ten, twenty and fifty years.

Re: What Happens to Stolen Bicycles?

#218

Post by Tichy »

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.)

Bike theft is common in Germany. There are also gangs who drive around with a truck at 3am and steal bikes from backyards. Brilliant: nobody sees them unlocking the bikes in the backyards.

Re: What Happens to Stolen Bicycles?

#219

Post by cpeterso »

qq66 wrote: post #113
dmm wrote: post #10

Cities should levy a bike tax and use it to fund some snipers that shoot assholes who steal bikes.

These guys did that -- set up a bait bike and paintballed the guy. I don't condone vigilantism but here is the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xi6XtthI2F0

That video is totally fake and a great way to get shot by real guns.

Re: What Happens to Stolen Bicycles?

#220

Post by pfedor »

spacemanaki wrote: post #188
dmm wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US also has a lot of crime. More people need to be in prison.

Care to back that up? Does the US really have that much more crime that justifies locking up more people? Recent stuff I've read on this agrees with Cass ( http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/01/30/120... ).

dmm's point was made by several people in the comments thread for the very article you cite, some of them quoting statistics: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3691372

tl;dr: In the U.S. in only 20% of murder cases the perpetrator is found and convicted of murder, compared with (allegedly) 90% in Japan. At the same time, even if all non-violent offenders (that includes all drug offenses) were released from prisons in the U.S. tomorrow, the U.S. would still have double the incarceration rate of Western Europe.

I don't know enough to have an opinion either way, but intuitively this message has a true ring to it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3696583

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