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What Happens to Stolen Bicycles?

blog.priceonomics.com

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Re: What Happens to Stolen Bicycles?

#231

Post by jlgreco »

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.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katko_v._Briney

This is the only case I could find on wikipedia. Placing a bicycle outside with no brakes hooked up is a far cry from rigging a spring loaded shotgun to the door of an unoccupied building.

It isn't even unheard of for people to legitimately (well, not legally I think...) ride bicycles without brakes, so where would you draw the line? If the police used a Ford Pinto as a bate car, could they be similarly at fault?

Re: What Happens to Stolen Bicycles?

#232

Post by vacri »

davidw wrote: post #174
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 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.

Regardless of what you think should happen to the thief, that's extremely irresponsible given bystanders or other people's property.

Re: What Happens to Stolen Bicycles?

#233

Post by nrp »

greggman wrote: post #211

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 (o…

My local police station in San Francisco still does bike registration: http://www.inglesidepolicestation.com/#!__bike-registration

The website looks like something out of the late 90's, and the form is a Word document, but it's nice that it exists. It evidently gets some use too, as they occasionally recover a stash of stolen bicycles and post pictures of the ones that weren't registered.

Re: What Happens to Stolen Bicycles?

#234

Post by bigiain »

ericd wrote: post #225
juan_juarez wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? Think about one thing you're passionate about. There's going to be products that are good enough for the casual, every-day user and there's going to be premium goods, even if there's a decreasing price/performance ratio. Since we're on HN, I feel…

Well, given the amount I will use that computer over the 2 years I have it and the disruption to flow that processing pauses cause, a ~10% increase in performance might be worth the premium. I imagine there's similar logic for bikes. But you're right, sometimes people just want to show off.

Wild handwavey ballpark estimate follows.

Your 2 year timeframe for a computer - lets call that 500 days (assuming its for work, and rounding to 2significant digits).

That's $1 per day "extra" for the slightly faster processor.

Which is what, well under two minutes of most people reading here's hourly rate.

If you use that computer for anything more processor bound than word processing, that apparently tiny speed bump of under 3% will probably _easily_ pay for it's $500 premium.

Hell, I'd probably save $1 per day in time spent not waiting for chrome to open/render all the links I click from HN in a day on a slightly faster machine…

Re: What Happens to Stolen Bicycles?

#235

Post by nrp »

Eliezer wrote: post #177

I wasn't surprised by the drugs part, but learning that stolen bikes are considered street currency actually makes me more bullish on Bitcoin. It's still a terrible idea, but it's got to be more convenient than using bikes as currency. I wonder what would happen if the criminal world started experiencing hyperdeflation?

Sure, buy crack with Bitcoins, and wait around for 20 minutes for the block chain to verify. The same delay that makes it irritating for legal in person transfers makes it useless for hand to hand criminal transfers.

Re: What Happens to Stolen Bicycles?

#236

Post by 001sky »

zurn wrote: post #149
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…

> More expensive bikes are built from lighter and stronger materials (such as carbon fiber) I would recommend anyone thinking carbon fiber makes stronger bikes to visit a topical image blog at http://www.bustedcarbon.com/ :) The weight issue is addressed elsewhere in comments...

That is a cool link. Carbon has tensile but not shear strength. As the evidence shows.

Re: What Happens to Stolen Bicycles?

#237

Post by jlgreco »

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…

I don't think you can measure the worth of a bicycle so simply. For many people, $1000 represents a very significant sum of money and their bicycle is their means of transportation. The theft of a bicycle can be a very life disrupting event.

There is a reason horse theft used to be dealt with so severely: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Horse_thief_hanging.png

Now, obviously we should not start hanging bike thieves (as tempting as that may seem) but I definitely think this is not a crime to take lightly at all.

Re: What Happens to Stolen Bicycles?

#238

Post by ChuckMcM »

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…

Interesting, I was thinking something that could be read easily an not easily tampered with. Say an RFID embedded serial number in the bike emblem/badge.

Re: What Happens to Stolen Bicycles?

#239

Post by saraid216 »

alttag wrote: post #198
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…

> 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.

I feel terrible for finding this side-splittingly hilarious.

Re: What Happens to Stolen Bicycles?

#240

Post by vacri »

pfedor wrote: post #220
spacemanaki wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Going from 7 times Europe's rate to double Europe's rate is still pretty significant.

On your second link, the first half is reasonable, but the second half utterly misses the point. The reason why the police wait in 'The Wire' and in real life is because they're gathering evidence. If they don't have enough evidence, the case won't stick. Similarly, they're trying to catch the kingpins. If you catch the front-line dudes you can fill your prisons with them, but there will always be more (in places where it's bad, like where the Wire is set).

It's weird that given the US already has such an immense problem with overincarceration that you think the solution is to lock people up over even more trivial issues. Where are those people going to be stored? Given the already clogged courts, aren't you going to have to abandon due process in order to get so many through?

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