What happens to your bike after it’s stolen
seattlemet.com
What happens to your bike after it’s stolen
1–10 of 86 posts
Re: What happens to your bike after it’s stolen
#2I know the Constituion forbids it, but I think cruel and unusual punishment is A-OK when it comes to bike thieves.
Re: What happens to your bike after it’s stolen
#3I'm reminded of this delicious line by a San Francisco bike guru:
"Bikes are one of the four commodities of the street — cash, drugs, sex, and bikes," Veysey told me. "You can virtually exchange one for another."
(From this lengthy and fascinating first-hand account of a reporter's attempt to recover his stolen bicycle)
http://www.sfbg.com/2007/02/13/chasing-my-stolen-bicycle?pag...
Re: What happens to your bike after it’s stolen
#4reminds me of this movie http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0040522/
Re: What happens to your bike after it’s stolen
#5If you have a nice bike, take a moment to register it: https://bikeindex.org/
Re: What happens to your bike after it’s stolen
#6I wonder to what extend the intensity of bike theft will incentivize bike users to buy and use bikes of low value. I have conflicting anecdotal experiences about this. I lived in Rotterdam, where bike theft is intense, but where people usually ride cheap bikes every day, and where you know you can buy a cheap bike to someone in the street, for a price as low a ten euros. Bikes are a cheap commodity in Rotterdam. In San Francisco, also a bike theft intensive city, people seem to be undeterred in riding expensive bikes, and the expected price is in the hundreds of dollars.
The difference might be that bikes sleep outside much more often in Rotterdam than in San Francisco.
edit: typos
Re: What happens to your bike after it’s stolen
#7So what is the solution to bikes getting stolen? It seems like we cannot really make locks that are cheap enough to manufacture to prevent thieves from stealing bikes/harvesting them for parts.
Do we put GPS trackers on all bikes? Can we enforce harsher punishment for bike thieves?
Re: What happens to your bike after it’s stolen
#8> Any bike thief worth his shim knows you’ve got to liquidate the rolling booty via parts
When I lived in New York in the mid-2000's it was pretty common to find folks trying to sell stolen bikes for $20 in public parks. Being younger with less sense and having lost a couple of bikes myself, I would sometimes get in their faces. That was a dumb idea, cf. the screwdriver anecdote in the article.
It was also an open secret that local restaurants bought stolen bikes for delivery workers and just covered them up in duct tape. I'm sure this doesn't explain 100% of bike thefts.
Maybe in Seattle chop shops are necessary, but in New York the problem seems so overwhelming that that just strikes me as a lot of unnecessary effort. The police generally could not care less.
Re: What happens to your bike after it’s stolen
#9Priceonomics wrote another interesting article on the subject:
http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/30393216796/what-happens-t...
Re: What happens to your bike after it’s stolen
#10> Any bike thief worth his shim knows you’ve got to liquidate the rolling booty via parts When I lived in New York in the mid-2000's it was pretty common to find folks trying to sell stolen bikes for $20 in public parks. Being younger with less sense and having lost a couple of bikes myself, I would sometimes get in their faces. That was a dumb idea, cf. the screwdriver anecdote in the article. It was also an open se…
i mean i get it, law enforcement have to prioritize their time just like everybody else.. and a stolen huffy is not going to trump the domestic violence call, or the hit and run.. but it still sucks.
come to think of it, stolen cars work effectively the same way. the only difference is they are tracked by so many other mechanisms (registration, plates, cameras, they are physically large enough to be difficult to hide). thieves suck.