18 ms·

Bikes are just like any other stolen item. They typically end up with brokers who warehouse and distribute these goods in ways that are hard to scrutinize. The

Bikes are just like any other stolen item. They typically end up with brokers who warehouse and distribute these goods in ways that are hard to scrutinize. The problem is that there will always be crackheads and there will always be sketchy people that willing to transact stolen goods. Its like a cosmic-scale version of wack-a-mole. The best way to deal with bike theft is for owners to get wise about how they store and lock their bikes. Some amount of common sense about bike choice helps too. If you can afford a $3000 bike you can also afford a secondary $100 bike that doesn't make bike thieves salivate while you're grocery shopping.

Animats 10y ago
If the brokers aren't being found, the police aren't doing their job. GPS trackers for bicycles are now down to $47.[1] When you find more than one stolen bike at one location, you've got something. This worked for cars. Lojack, with their hidden transponder, caused a significant reduction in auto thefts. Lojack claims a 90% recovery rate. The main problem for bicycles is battery life. Someone needs to design a system which needs almost no power until the bicycle is stolen. Lojack, which is a pre-GPS technology, does something like that. Their unit normally isn't transmitting. It's just listening to FM broadcast station subcarriers for its own serial number. When a car with Lojack is stolen, Lojack, which is plugged into police stolen car databases, has their FM stations broadcast the serial number repeatedly. The addressed Lojack unit wakes up and starts transmitting. Lojack makes a deal with police departments to put Lojack receivers in police cars. These light up when there's a transmitting stolen car in range. You could do this today by connecting a digital pager to a GPS/GSM location transmitter. The GPS/GSM unit is normally off, and only turns on when the pager wakes it up. You can get six weeks of standby time on a digital pager easily. Add a power-from-motion device and you could probably keep the pager running indefinitely, as long as the bike gets some use. OK, IoT crowd, get moving. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Bicycle-GPS-Tracker-GPS305-Real-time/dp/B00MM01DCA https://www.amazon.com/Bicycle-GPS-Tracker-GPS305-Real-time/...
- crispyambulance 10y ago
  Car-theft is alive and still doing quite well in spite of lojack and other technologies. Admittedly, cars today are harder to steal for a wide variety of reasons. Knowing approximately where the bike is is only 1/3 of the battle. You still have to physically put your hands on it and remove it from whoever has it. I applaud the intent of a bike "lojack" but good luck getting the police to lift a finger when your bike tells you where it is. That 50 bucks is better spent on a good U-lock upgrade.
  - rconti 10y ago
    Between 1993 and 2012, Property Crime has fallen from a rate of 4740 to 2859 per 100,000 inhabitants in the US. 2012's rate was 60% of 1993's rate. Burglary from 1100 to 670 (61%) Larceny from 3034 to 1959 (65%). Compared to those dramatic declines (and yes, 1993 was a pretty bad year for crime in the US, but that's the FBI's stats), motor vehicle theft has fallen off a cliff. In 1993 there were 606 per 100,000 inhabitants. in 2012 there were 230. The new number is 38% of the old number. I hear about fairly advanced car thefts in the UK all the time (RFID cloning, etc), but it's a problem that virtually doesn't exist anymore in the US in the eyes of car enthusiasts. (Yes, 20 year old Honda Accord parked in the ghetto is still a target. But modern vehicles in relatively good areas are simply not something we worry about anymore). https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2012/crime-in-the-u.s.-2012/tables/1tabledatadecoverviewpdf/table_1_crime_in_the_united_states_by_volume_and_rate_per_100000_inhabitants_1993-2012.xls https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2012/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
    - Spooky23 10y ago
      In olden times, stealing a car was trivial. Ditto radios, which had resale value. Now it's parts. Wheels, airbags, bumpers, etc.
      - hnal943 10y ago
        It's also to provide untraceable vehicles for other crimes. My city has a huge carjacking problem right now, and most of them are used as get away vehicles in other crimes.
- enraged_camel 10y ago
  Lojacks are trivial to remove. They are one of the first things experienced car thieves look for, remove and dispose of. A GPS device on a bike will be the same thing. You can't embed it into the frame either, since you as the legitimate owner need to replace its battery every now and then, which means it needs to be easily removable.
  - jclarkcom 10y ago
    Perhaps use rechargeable batteries and inductive charging
    - 1_2__3 10y ago
      Briefly hook the frame up to a car battery and be on your way.
  - mrob 10y ago
    Put it inside the down tube. These usually have holes for mounting bottle holders, so you could pass the charging wires through the holes, disguised as part of the bottle holder mounts. And you'd have to remove the bottom bracket to get it out, which is slow and inconvenient.
  - oftenwrong 10y ago
    >They are one of the first things experienced car thieves look for If they are only effective against inexperienced car thieves, they still have value. It's like minor security measures that keep out script kiddies.
- ourmandave 10y ago
  Heh, IoT. Making bike thieves watch 30 seconds ads before they can disable the tracker would be vigilantism all right.
- uola 10y ago
  I think a better variation of that idea is embedding (or welding on) some sort of RFID chip in the frame that could be reported stolen or reprogrammed with a long code. Then you could search for stolen bikes in public places or put a automatic reader with a large siren on public bike paths and parking spots. Basically DRM for bikes. It's might be challenging to make something that is cheap, long range (for RFID) and tamper proof of course.
  - pbhjpbhj 10y ago
    >embedding (or welding on) some sort of RFID chip in the frame // Why not just a low tech BIN (Bicycle version of a Vehicle ID Number (VIN)) stamped in the frame on the upright. You could also have a QR version printed. A traffic warden then could scan a rack of bikes and find any "reported stolen" ones. Bikes with no QR would look suspicious and you could check the BIN (as would QR-BIN not matching bike style, colour, location). The BIN could be changed, but then so could an RFID chip (or a tracker); ground off frames would also look suspicious and warrant additional investigation. ? You'd have to convince bike manufacturers to add BINs to bikes, which is likely against their financial interests as they probably sell more new bikes if bikes are more often stolen.
bfuller 10y ago
unfortunately in my experience it doesn't matter if you have a $3000 bike or $100 bike if the crack head stealing the bike is only going to get $20 for it
- crispyambulance 10y ago
  Well, if your $100 dollar bike is locked-up with a beefy u-lock next to other $100 bikes with flimsy cable locks...
- c22 10y ago
  There are two kinds of bike thieves, the kind that target any bike with weak security and sell it for $20 and the kind that are specifically targeting $3000 bikes in an organized fashion for whom no bike lock will be an effective deterrent if your bike is parked somewhere unattended for a long time or in the same place on a recognizable schedule.
  - yohoho22 10y ago
    Yeah, we had one of the latter kind get taken down here in Austin last year: http://keyetv.com/news/local/austin-police-arrest-man-connected-to-97-high-end-bike-thefts http://keyetv.com/news/local/austin-police-arrest-man-connec... Connected to 97 thefts of bikes valued from $1k to $12k, including taking only "the most expensive one" of the several owned by the fella interviewed in that story. Although he really was exploiting a weakness, in that people figured their bikes would be safe in their closed-up garages. I wonder if a good lock would have been enough to make him move on to the next target on his list.
    - bfuller 10y ago
      Maybe its just because I am a cyclist and have an emotional attachment to my bike (a 90s bianchi with campagnolo components that I paid $100 at a pawn shop for... which probably means it was stolen) but I truly despise bicycle thieves.
nikanj 10y ago
Every time you give advice like this, imagine giving the same advice to car owners. "Sure, you can afford a $60k SUV, but you really should also have a $2k shitbox that you drive whenever you can't park it in a locked garage"
- crispyambulance 10y ago
  Actually, quite a lot of car-owners think exactly that way (albeit not because of theft concerns but more about damage, wear/tear, accidents). In any case, a 60K vehicle is going to be significantly harder to steal and it will be far easier to get the police to pay attention to that theft than a 3K bike.
  - LeifCarrotson 10y ago
    Here in the salty Midwest, "winter beaters" are a popular thing. Not that they defeat the cold and snow, but that they sacrificially get beat on when it's nasty out. Keep gas-guzzling, 4-wheel-drive, wins-in-a-crash truck thing with rusted out underbody for December to March, and a nicer car that never sees salt for the warmer months. Exchange insurance from one vehicle to the other as necessary.
    - analog31 10y ago
      Indeed, I have a winter bike for this reason. And another bike for taking to higher theft / vandalism areas such as downtown and the university campus. Plus, admittedly, it's fun to tinker with and ride different bikes. ;-)
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      - bfuller 10y ago
        realistically what bicycle enthusiast only has one bike??
brewdad 10y ago
But it doesn't have to be this way. I was in Copenhagen a few weeks ago. I couldn't get over the number of bikes parked overnight that were locked only to themselves. Many bikes simply had their U-lock run through their front tire as a deterrent to anyone who might ride off on it. The bikes weren't actually locked to anything at all. Amazingly, these bikes were still there in the morning. In Portland, none of those bikes would have lasted an hour "locked" like that. Ask yourself "why is that?"
- coolsunglasses 10y ago
  People that don't see themselves in their fellow citizen.
- analogmemory 10y ago
  What percentage of Denmark's population is transient/homeless? People with nothing to lose are more likely to steal something.
  - brewdad 10y ago
    That's a bit of my point. In America, we allow far too many to get to a place where they have nothing left to lose. I'm not sure if Basic Income is the answer. Perhaps an actual mental health system. Whatever the solution, the status quo in the USA is shameful.
    - wpietri 10y ago
      Yeah, I'm definitely for an actual mental health system. As well as a free, robust, and easily available addiction treatment system. And an energetic program to get down-and-out people off the street and back into productive lives. People inevitably say, "what will it cost?" But that ignores how much we spend now. Wasted lives, mangled minds, broken families that pass trauma and dysfunction to the next generation. Having personally lost bikes and chased thieves, I applaud join this vigilante's efforts. But that can't be the only thing to do. No 7-year-old wants to grow up to be a meth-addicted bike thief. As doing a Five Whys teaches us, if you're serious about solving a problem, you have to attack multiple levels of causality at once.

Animats 10y ago

If the brokers aren't being found, the police aren't doing their job. GPS trackers for bicycles are now down to $47.[1] When you find more than one stolen bike at one location, you've got something. This worked for cars. Lojack, with their hidden transponder, caused a significant reduction in auto thefts. Lojack claims a 90% recovery rate. The main problem for bicycles is battery life. Someone needs to design a system which needs almost no power until the bicycle is stolen. Lojack, which is a pre-GPS technology, does something like that. Their unit normally isn't transmitting. It's just listening to FM broadcast station subcarriers for its own serial number. When a car with Lojack is stolen, Lojack, which is plugged into police stolen car databases, has their FM stations broadcast the serial number repeatedly. The addressed Lojack unit wakes up and starts transmitting. Lojack makes a deal with police departments to put Lojack receivers in police cars. These light up when there's a transmitting stolen car in range. You could do this today by connecting a digital pager to a GPS/GSM location transmitter. The GPS/GSM unit is normally off, and only turns on when the pager wakes it up. You can get six weeks of standby time on a digital pager easily. Add a power-from-motion device and you could probably keep the pager running indefinitely, as long as the bike gets some use. OK, IoT crowd, get moving. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Bicycle-GPS-Tracker-GPS305-Real-time/dp/B00MM01DCA https://www.amazon.com/Bicycle-GPS-Tracker-GPS305-Real-time/...

crispyambulance 10y ago
Car-theft is alive and still doing quite well in spite of lojack and other technologies. Admittedly, cars today are harder to steal for a wide variety of reasons. Knowing approximately where the bike is is only 1/3 of the battle. You still have to physically put your hands on it and remove it from whoever has it. I applaud the intent of a bike "lojack" but good luck getting the police to lift a finger when your bike tells you where it is. That 50 bucks is better spent on a good U-lock upgrade.
- rconti 10y ago
  Between 1993 and 2012, Property Crime has fallen from a rate of 4740 to 2859 per 100,000 inhabitants in the US. 2012's rate was 60% of 1993's rate. Burglary from 1100 to 670 (61%) Larceny from 3034 to 1959 (65%). Compared to those dramatic declines (and yes, 1993 was a pretty bad year for crime in the US, but that's the FBI's stats), motor vehicle theft has fallen off a cliff. In 1993 there were 606 per 100,000 inhabitants. in 2012 there were 230. The new number is 38% of the old number. I hear about fairly advanced car thefts in the UK all the time (RFID cloning, etc), but it's a problem that virtually doesn't exist anymore in the US in the eyes of car enthusiasts. (Yes, 20 year old Honda Accord parked in the ghetto is still a target. But modern vehicles in relatively good areas are simply not something we worry about anymore). https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2012/crime-in-the-u.s.-2012/tables/1tabledatadecoverviewpdf/table_1_crime_in_the_united_states_by_volume_and_rate_per_100000_inhabitants_1993-2012.xls https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2012/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
  - Spooky23 10y ago
    In olden times, stealing a car was trivial. Ditto radios, which had resale value. Now it's parts. Wheels, airbags, bumpers, etc.
    - hnal943 10y ago
      It's also to provide untraceable vehicles for other crimes. My city has a huge carjacking problem right now, and most of them are used as get away vehicles in other crimes.
enraged_camel 10y ago
Lojacks are trivial to remove. They are one of the first things experienced car thieves look for, remove and dispose of. A GPS device on a bike will be the same thing. You can't embed it into the frame either, since you as the legitimate owner need to replace its battery every now and then, which means it needs to be easily removable.
- jclarkcom 10y ago
  Perhaps use rechargeable batteries and inductive charging
  - 1_2__3 10y ago
    Briefly hook the frame up to a car battery and be on your way.
- mrob 10y ago
  Put it inside the down tube. These usually have holes for mounting bottle holders, so you could pass the charging wires through the holes, disguised as part of the bottle holder mounts. And you'd have to remove the bottom bracket to get it out, which is slow and inconvenient.
- oftenwrong 10y ago
  >They are one of the first things experienced car thieves look for If they are only effective against inexperienced car thieves, they still have value. It's like minor security measures that keep out script kiddies.
ourmandave 10y ago
Heh, IoT. Making bike thieves watch 30 seconds ads before they can disable the tracker would be vigilantism all right.
uola 10y ago
I think a better variation of that idea is embedding (or welding on) some sort of RFID chip in the frame that could be reported stolen or reprogrammed with a long code. Then you could search for stolen bikes in public places or put a automatic reader with a large siren on public bike paths and parking spots. Basically DRM for bikes. It's might be challenging to make something that is cheap, long range (for RFID) and tamper proof of course.
- pbhjpbhj 10y ago
  >embedding (or welding on) some sort of RFID chip in the frame // Why not just a low tech BIN (Bicycle version of a Vehicle ID Number (VIN)) stamped in the frame on the upright. You could also have a QR version printed. A traffic warden then could scan a rack of bikes and find any "reported stolen" ones. Bikes with no QR would look suspicious and you could check the BIN (as would QR-BIN not matching bike style, colour, location). The BIN could be changed, but then so could an RFID chip (or a tracker); ground off frames would also look suspicious and warrant additional investigation. ? You'd have to convince bike manufacturers to add BINs to bikes, which is likely against their financial interests as they probably sell more new bikes if bikes are more often stolen.

bfuller 10y ago

unfortunately in my experience it doesn't matter if you have a $3000 bike or $100 bike if the crack head stealing the bike is only going to get $20 for it

crispyambulance 10y ago
Well, if your $100 dollar bike is locked-up with a beefy u-lock next to other $100 bikes with flimsy cable locks...
c22 10y ago
There are two kinds of bike thieves, the kind that target any bike with weak security and sell it for $20 and the kind that are specifically targeting $3000 bikes in an organized fashion for whom no bike lock will be an effective deterrent if your bike is parked somewhere unattended for a long time or in the same place on a recognizable schedule.
- yohoho22 10y ago
  Yeah, we had one of the latter kind get taken down here in Austin last year: http://keyetv.com/news/local/austin-police-arrest-man-connected-to-97-high-end-bike-thefts http://keyetv.com/news/local/austin-police-arrest-man-connec... Connected to 97 thefts of bikes valued from $1k to $12k, including taking only "the most expensive one" of the several owned by the fella interviewed in that story. Although he really was exploiting a weakness, in that people figured their bikes would be safe in their closed-up garages. I wonder if a good lock would have been enough to make him move on to the next target on his list.
  - bfuller 10y ago
    Maybe its just because I am a cyclist and have an emotional attachment to my bike (a 90s bianchi with campagnolo components that I paid $100 at a pawn shop for... which probably means it was stolen) but I truly despise bicycle thieves.

nikanj 10y ago

Every time you give advice like this, imagine giving the same advice to car owners. "Sure, you can afford a $60k SUV, but you really should also have a $2k shitbox that you drive whenever you can't park it in a locked garage"

crispyambulance 10y ago
Actually, quite a lot of car-owners think exactly that way (albeit not because of theft concerns but more about damage, wear/tear, accidents). In any case, a 60K vehicle is going to be significantly harder to steal and it will be far easier to get the police to pay attention to that theft than a 3K bike.
- LeifCarrotson 10y ago
  Here in the salty Midwest, "winter beaters" are a popular thing. Not that they defeat the cold and snow, but that they sacrificially get beat on when it's nasty out. Keep gas-guzzling, 4-wheel-drive, wins-in-a-crash truck thing with rusted out underbody for December to March, and a nicer car that never sees salt for the warmer months. Exchange insurance from one vehicle to the other as necessary.
  - analog31 10y ago
    Indeed, I have a winter bike for this reason. And another bike for taking to higher theft / vandalism areas such as downtown and the university campus. Plus, admittedly, it's fun to tinker with and ride different bikes. ;-)
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - bfuller 10y ago
      realistically what bicycle enthusiast only has one bike??

brewdad 10y ago

But it doesn't have to be this way. I was in Copenhagen a few weeks ago. I couldn't get over the number of bikes parked overnight that were locked only to themselves. Many bikes simply had their U-lock run through their front tire as a deterrent to anyone who might ride off on it. The bikes weren't actually locked to anything at all. Amazingly, these bikes were still there in the morning. In Portland, none of those bikes would have lasted an hour "locked" like that. Ask yourself "why is that?"

coolsunglasses 10y ago
People that don't see themselves in their fellow citizen.
analogmemory 10y ago
What percentage of Denmark's population is transient/homeless? People with nothing to lose are more likely to steal something.
- brewdad 10y ago
  That's a bit of my point. In America, we allow far too many to get to a place where they have nothing left to lose. I'm not sure if Basic Income is the answer. Perhaps an actual mental health system. Whatever the solution, the status quo in the USA is shameful.
  - wpietri 10y ago
    Yeah, I'm definitely for an actual mental health system. As well as a free, robust, and easily available addiction treatment system. And an energetic program to get down-and-out people off the street and back into productive lives. People inevitably say, "what will it cost?" But that ignores how much we spend now. Wasted lives, mangled minds, broken families that pass trauma and dysfunction to the next generation. Having personally lost bikes and chased thieves, I applaud join this vigilante's efforts. But that can't be the only thing to do. No 7-year-old wants to grow up to be a meth-addicted bike thief. As doing a Five Whys teaches us, if you're serious about solving a problem, you have to attack multiple levels of causality at once.