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Just need a way to deal with bike theft. My number one concern is parking my pretty decent bike within view of where I’m sitting or not leaving it unattended fo

Just need a way to deal with bike theft. My number one concern is parking my pretty decent bike within view of where I’m sitting or not leaving it unattended for over five minutes. I’m insured, but I have a bond with my wheels! If anyone has recommendations for stealth theft detection/tracking devices I’m all ears.

MrFantastic 4y ago
Cover the branding labels on your bike. The thieves want to steal expensive bikes, not a walmart bike. I used white engineering reflective tape. They'd have to be very dedicated thief to notice to the Deore XT components. Plus, the reflective tape is very visible at night.
- olyjohn 4y ago
  Yeah... this is totally wrong, or maybe it depends on where you live... Here, cheap bikes get stolen all the time. I started riding my heavy-ass, ancient, steel, suspensionless bike that I had bought 20 years prior for like $200 from Target. Not even a pawn shop would want to take the bike, because they are cheap junk. It got stolen from me in less than a week after starting a biking commute. And yes I locked it up. The lock was cut right off. The thing is people aren't stealing them to always sell them. Sometimes it's just easier to quickly grab a bike when the thief needs to get across town for some other reason. When they get to where they want to go, they just ditch the bike. Sometimes I think some people just want to steal a bike for no real reason. In Seattle, I've seen gigantic piles with hundred of bikes in them just sitting in a homeless camp. They clearly aren't selling those bikes, as they've been sitting out in the rain for months, or even years now. And I guarantee those homeless camps aren't full of multi-thousand dollar bikes.
badlucklottery 4y ago
>If anyone has recommendations for stealth theft detection/tracking devices I’m all ears. If you have a bike lock/chain that can resist bolt cutters, you're probably fine for everything other than leaving it overnight. Casual bike thieves are looking for easy money and likely aren't going to bust out an angle grinder in the middle of the day unless your bike is obviously worth a grand+.
- antihero 4y ago
  Here in the UK thieves just use portable angle grinders that go through any lock like butter. I have a hefty Abus “sold secure” (requirement of insurance) D lock that I lock through the frame, but I’ve watched enough lock picking lawyer to know this won’t stop thieves with angle grinders (most thieves now) or ones handy with a disc detainer pick.
  - happyopossum 4y ago
    What kind of society allows someone to use an incredibly noisy and obvious tool like an angle grinder in public, then ride off on a bike? Does everyone just walk by because they're afraid to get involved?
    - gpm 4y ago
      I've witnessed it, called the cops and took videos, but I'm not going to physically fight the guy with an angle grinder and little to lose - not even if it was my own bike. That was the same reaction everyone else around had.
    - brewdad 4y ago
      Yes. Are you willing to risk your life or serious injury over a stranger's property? Very few people are.
  - badlucklottery 4y ago
    In the US (at least for now) the angle grinder crews are mostly limited to nights when they can steal a lot of bikes a once and chuck them into a truck/van (ex: bike racks near student housing in college towns). But the exception is always high-value bikes. That's why I called out bikes that aren't "obviously worth a grand+". If you leave out a nice eBike or a superlight road bike, the thieves have solid financial motivation to risk breaking out the cordless grinder and making a ruckus to steal it. Hell, sometimes thieves would straight up wait for people to come back to their bikes after brunch or whatever and mug them for it after they unlocked it in Albuquerque. No tools needed other than a knife.
aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
Easy. Vote for politicians who promise punishing bike theft with multi-year prison sentences. The reasoning is simple: bike thieves disproportionately contribute to climate change by discouraging large-scale bike use. This must be punished.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  > Vote for politicians who promise punishing bike theft with multi-year prison sentences Please don't - this is typical 'tough on crime' trick: promise long sentences, so easy - longer sentence-less crime, right? Wrong. Sentenses are useless if no-one ever gets caught. Look at countries with the toughest sentenses in the world, and you will find they have loads of crime You actually have to use your brain, and think and plan, on how to make sure criminals are caught. You have to take real action like training investigators, installing trackers, registering property, etc. For example in UK concervatives have been in power for 12 years, punishment got much harsher but crime is growing because they have cut police numbers, and you chance of getting caught is ~0%. The longer people get away with crime, the better they become at crime. Now we have a large 'talent pool' of highly trained thieves.
  - The-Bus 4y ago
    (I think the poster was being facetious)
  - bluecalm 4y ago
    Idk, it seems theft is low in countries where they cut hands for it. Bike theft is a very harmful crime. It stops the move to healthier lifestyle, it leaves people, often poor ones who don't have cars without means of transportation and it cause many to not commute by bike. I want aggressive policing, including trap bikes set up by the police to fish out potential thieves and lock them for years once caught, alternatively make them wear GPS locator all the time. I want them to feel fear every time they think about stealing. Maybe empty "tough on crime" promise isn't enough but it's surely better than typical approach of "let's all think about those poor thieves" or victim blaming (just lock your bike with 2 U-locks and keep your eyes on it all the time if you don't want it stolen).
mauvehaus 4y ago
In my experience it's mostly a matter of not having the most desirable bike or the shittiest lock. Put a $100 u-lock on a $300 bike, and you can almost be assured that you'll have neither. Put a nice enough lock on yours, and you can be pretty sure you won't have the most easily stolen bike either. At least in the US, road bikes are pretty much immune to being stolen because they're seen as terminally uncool by the lay population. Would I leave a $5000 road bike locked up at a subway station? Not likely, but I'm not fast enough to justify owning one anyways. $2000, yeah probably, as long as I'm not leaving it there daily. Anecdotally, police won't do shit to recover a stolen bike in the US. Having some kind of tracker is only going to help you once it's already been stolen. I'd focus my efforts on preventing the theft in the first place.
- Bluecobra 4y ago
  Having a dumpy old bike helps. I have accidentally locked my cheap u-lock to the bike itself instead of the bike rack a few times at a train station and nobody took it. The worst thing that has ever happened is that someone stole my quick release skewer, so I have a screw on one now.
- microtonal 4y ago
  In my experience it's mostly a matter of not having the most desirable bike or the shittiest lock. Right, in The Netherlands, where there are a lot of bikes, this is the basic rule: just make sure that there are other bikes that are more attractive to steal, even if it's a new bike. The second basic rule is: use a chain lock to attach your bike frame to an unmovable object, so that a thief cannot just throw your bike in a van and remove the locks elsewhere. What I do: - Use a ring lock for the back wheel. Makes it unattractive to steal just the wheel. The lock needs to be unscrewed from the frame to remove the wheel. - Use a chain lock and make it go through the frame, front wheel, and attach it to an unmovable object. In order to steal the frame, the thief would have to saw through the chain in plain sight. - If there is no supervised parking, park the bike in an area where there are enough people where someone will notice a thief trying to break the locks. - Get bike insurance. It's usually only 10 Euro per month and if your bike gets stolen, you get back the bike's value. - Some insurers also install a tracker. This has double value: bikes with a tracker are less attractive to steal. Secondly, bikes with a tracker are usually moved to a 'cool-off' location first. This is usually just some place removed a few streets from where the bike was stolen. If it's still there after a few days, the thieves know that nobody is actively tracking the bike and they can take it somewhere to comfortably break the lock. So, it's likely that the insurer will find the bike at the cool-off location without much damage.
throw0101a 4y ago
> Just need a way to deal with bike theft. Vehicle registration works, but takes a bit of effort: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=el1Xznv5ge4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=el1Xznv5ge4 Vancouver had a 42% drop in theft after joining this program: * https://project529.com/garage https://project529.com/garage Created by X-box co-founder: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_Allard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_Allard
- acomjean 4y ago
  Someone broke into my building and stole a bunch of bikes from the bike room (people weren’t locking them up once inside). The few that were registered to park at the university (big silver stickers) were left alone. Often I don’t think the bike theives check if the bike is “good”. My cousins bike was just over $150 new and was stolen. He had a cheap lock because he thought who would steal this. I’ve been riding 10 years a moderately decent bike. No issues but I use a U lock which is decent. Please lock through the frame. I’ve seen like 6 front wheels locked to bike racks with the rest of the bike gone..
  - nomel 4y ago
    We had hundreds and hundreds of bikes at my previous job. It was amazing. You could just hop on and go anywhere. Nearly all disappeared. As it turns out, the scruffy looking guy I saw, riding one bike and steering another with his free hand, wasn't collecting and returning them in the whee hours of the morning. The new bikes had GPS attached, but they limited the numbers, due the theft. Those slowly disappeared, too. Last I saw, there were just a few bikes at each bike rack, compared to maybe 50 at each.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
  A few years ago my wife had her registered bicycle stolen after I screwed up and left the garage open. We reported it stolen and only took 3 days for it to make its way back to us. It made its way back to us because the cops stopped someone for looking like they too nice of a bike, so that's a whole other problem, but registration works.
InCityDreams 4y ago
Amazon do bike alarms. $16? Kind of intended for motorbikes(?) but when i turn then both on - one wedged under the seat and another less permanently attached - the conversations generated guarantee me onlookers (bar/ cafe) almost look after the bike for me. Decent lock, too. Drop the chain off and whack it out of gear (it hurts if you forget). If im inside and i see someone checking out thd bike i 'test' the alarm.
kuschku 4y ago
Honestly (at least from my experiences in Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Essen, and Kiel): As long as your bike isn’t super expensive (e.g., I’ve got this: https://boc24.de/products/bocas-bari-trapez https://boc24.de/products/bocas-bari-trapez) and you’ve locked it with a lock that’s resistant to bolt cutters (even something as simple as https://www.kaufland.de/product/313003426/ https://www.kaufland.de/product/313003426/), it’s not going to get stolen. Even if you’ve locked it overnight for multiple days at the main train station (tested in Düsseldorf and Kiel), it’s going to be fine.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  About locks - nobody ever picks locks, only brute force is used. If the lock is a cable lock, it's worthless. If the lock is solid metal over 5mm, it can only be cut by angle grinder. Once you are in angle grinder territory, whether it's 5mm or 15mm doesn't seem to matter. So i think there is no point spending over $100 on a lock. Additionaly, you can use a hydrawlick jack to break d-locks, but that doesnt work on chains and is very dependant on how exactly you locked up
  - yonaguska 4y ago
    And smaller locks are trendy now because it's much harder to use an angle grinder on a tiny u-lock without sawing through something else.
ClumsyPilot 4y ago
there are quite a few trackers, but I don't know how much they help you in recovering the bike https://pimpmybikeretail.co.uk/product/sherlock-bike-tracker-bike-gps-bicycle-tracker/ https://pimpmybikeretail.co.uk/product/sherlock-bike-tracker...
solardev 4y ago
These are great, light u-lock style frame locks made of titanium: https://tigrlock.com/ https://tigrlock.com/ Your wheels and components might still get stolen, but not much is really going to stop that. You can add a cable lock if you really want to but they're easy to cut through. Bike registration (https://bikeindex.org/ https://bikeindex.org/) might help in some circumstances. But really, insurance is the thing that will cover you. Many renters'/homeowners' insurances will cover theft of bikes too, even when you're away from home, so you don't necessarily need supplemental bike insurance. The thing about the trackers is that they're for after-the-fact recovery, not deterrent (especially if they're stealth). It's just going to get parted out, so if you're lucky you might recover the frame and not much else.
markvdb 4y ago
Getting a good quality folding bicycle (Brompton!) may be even easier. Just take it inside with you.

MrFantastic 4y ago

Cover the branding labels on your bike. The thieves want to steal expensive bikes, not a walmart bike. I used white engineering reflective tape. They'd have to be very dedicated thief to notice to the Deore XT components. Plus, the reflective tape is very visible at night.

olyjohn 4y ago
Yeah... this is totally wrong, or maybe it depends on where you live... Here, cheap bikes get stolen all the time. I started riding my heavy-ass, ancient, steel, suspensionless bike that I had bought 20 years prior for like $200 from Target. Not even a pawn shop would want to take the bike, because they are cheap junk. It got stolen from me in less than a week after starting a biking commute. And yes I locked it up. The lock was cut right off. The thing is people aren't stealing them to always sell them. Sometimes it's just easier to quickly grab a bike when the thief needs to get across town for some other reason. When they get to where they want to go, they just ditch the bike. Sometimes I think some people just want to steal a bike for no real reason. In Seattle, I've seen gigantic piles with hundred of bikes in them just sitting in a homeless camp. They clearly aren't selling those bikes, as they've been sitting out in the rain for months, or even years now. And I guarantee those homeless camps aren't full of multi-thousand dollar bikes.

badlucklottery 4y ago

>If anyone has recommendations for stealth theft detection/tracking devices I’m all ears. If you have a bike lock/chain that can resist bolt cutters, you're probably fine for everything other than leaving it overnight. Casual bike thieves are looking for easy money and likely aren't going to bust out an angle grinder in the middle of the day unless your bike is obviously worth a grand+.

antihero 4y ago
Here in the UK thieves just use portable angle grinders that go through any lock like butter. I have a hefty Abus “sold secure” (requirement of insurance) D lock that I lock through the frame, but I’ve watched enough lock picking lawyer to know this won’t stop thieves with angle grinders (most thieves now) or ones handy with a disc detainer pick.
- happyopossum 4y ago
  What kind of society allows someone to use an incredibly noisy and obvious tool like an angle grinder in public, then ride off on a bike? Does everyone just walk by because they're afraid to get involved?
  - gpm 4y ago
    I've witnessed it, called the cops and took videos, but I'm not going to physically fight the guy with an angle grinder and little to lose - not even if it was my own bike. That was the same reaction everyone else around had.
  - brewdad 4y ago
    Yes. Are you willing to risk your life or serious injury over a stranger's property? Very few people are.
- badlucklottery 4y ago
  In the US (at least for now) the angle grinder crews are mostly limited to nights when they can steal a lot of bikes a once and chuck them into a truck/van (ex: bike racks near student housing in college towns). But the exception is always high-value bikes. That's why I called out bikes that aren't "obviously worth a grand+". If you leave out a nice eBike or a superlight road bike, the thieves have solid financial motivation to risk breaking out the cordless grinder and making a ruckus to steal it. Hell, sometimes thieves would straight up wait for people to come back to their bikes after brunch or whatever and mug them for it after they unlocked it in Albuquerque. No tools needed other than a knife.

aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago

Easy. Vote for politicians who promise punishing bike theft with multi-year prison sentences. The reasoning is simple: bike thieves disproportionately contribute to climate change by discouraging large-scale bike use. This must be punished.

ClumsyPilot 4y ago
> Vote for politicians who promise punishing bike theft with multi-year prison sentences Please don't - this is typical 'tough on crime' trick: promise long sentences, so easy - longer sentence-less crime, right? Wrong. Sentenses are useless if no-one ever gets caught. Look at countries with the toughest sentenses in the world, and you will find they have loads of crime You actually have to use your brain, and think and plan, on how to make sure criminals are caught. You have to take real action like training investigators, installing trackers, registering property, etc. For example in UK concervatives have been in power for 12 years, punishment got much harsher but crime is growing because they have cut police numbers, and you chance of getting caught is ~0%. The longer people get away with crime, the better they become at crime. Now we have a large 'talent pool' of highly trained thieves.
- The-Bus 4y ago
  (I think the poster was being facetious)
- bluecalm 4y ago
  Idk, it seems theft is low in countries where they cut hands for it. Bike theft is a very harmful crime. It stops the move to healthier lifestyle, it leaves people, often poor ones who don't have cars without means of transportation and it cause many to not commute by bike. I want aggressive policing, including trap bikes set up by the police to fish out potential thieves and lock them for years once caught, alternatively make them wear GPS locator all the time. I want them to feel fear every time they think about stealing. Maybe empty "tough on crime" promise isn't enough but it's surely better than typical approach of "let's all think about those poor thieves" or victim blaming (just lock your bike with 2 U-locks and keep your eyes on it all the time if you don't want it stolen).

mauvehaus 4y ago

In my experience it's mostly a matter of not having the most desirable bike or the shittiest lock. Put a $100 u-lock on a $300 bike, and you can almost be assured that you'll have neither. Put a nice enough lock on yours, and you can be pretty sure you won't have the most easily stolen bike either. At least in the US, road bikes are pretty much immune to being stolen because they're seen as terminally uncool by the lay population. Would I leave a $5000 road bike locked up at a subway station? Not likely, but I'm not fast enough to justify owning one anyways. $2000, yeah probably, as long as I'm not leaving it there daily. Anecdotally, police won't do shit to recover a stolen bike in the US. Having some kind of tracker is only going to help you once it's already been stolen. I'd focus my efforts on preventing the theft in the first place.

Bluecobra 4y ago
Having a dumpy old bike helps. I have accidentally locked my cheap u-lock to the bike itself instead of the bike rack a few times at a train station and nobody took it. The worst thing that has ever happened is that someone stole my quick release skewer, so I have a screw on one now.
microtonal 4y ago
In my experience it's mostly a matter of not having the most desirable bike or the shittiest lock. Right, in The Netherlands, where there are a lot of bikes, this is the basic rule: just make sure that there are other bikes that are more attractive to steal, even if it's a new bike. The second basic rule is: use a chain lock to attach your bike frame to an unmovable object, so that a thief cannot just throw your bike in a van and remove the locks elsewhere. What I do: - Use a ring lock for the back wheel. Makes it unattractive to steal just the wheel. The lock needs to be unscrewed from the frame to remove the wheel. - Use a chain lock and make it go through the frame, front wheel, and attach it to an unmovable object. In order to steal the frame, the thief would have to saw through the chain in plain sight. - If there is no supervised parking, park the bike in an area where there are enough people where someone will notice a thief trying to break the locks. - Get bike insurance. It's usually only 10 Euro per month and if your bike gets stolen, you get back the bike's value. - Some insurers also install a tracker. This has double value: bikes with a tracker are less attractive to steal. Secondly, bikes with a tracker are usually moved to a 'cool-off' location first. This is usually just some place removed a few streets from where the bike was stolen. If it's still there after a few days, the thieves know that nobody is actively tracking the bike and they can take it somewhere to comfortably break the lock. So, it's likely that the insurer will find the bike at the cool-off location without much damage.

throw0101a 4y ago

> Just need a way to deal with bike theft. Vehicle registration works, but takes a bit of effort: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=el1Xznv5ge4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=el1Xznv5ge4 Vancouver had a 42% drop in theft after joining this program: * https://project529.com/garage https://project529.com/garage Created by X-box co-founder: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_Allard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_Allard

acomjean 4y ago
Someone broke into my building and stole a bunch of bikes from the bike room (people weren’t locking them up once inside). The few that were registered to park at the university (big silver stickers) were left alone. Often I don’t think the bike theives check if the bike is “good”. My cousins bike was just over $150 new and was stolen. He had a cheap lock because he thought who would steal this. I’ve been riding 10 years a moderately decent bike. No issues but I use a U lock which is decent. Please lock through the frame. I’ve seen like 6 front wheels locked to bike racks with the rest of the bike gone..
- nomel 4y ago
  We had hundreds and hundreds of bikes at my previous job. It was amazing. You could just hop on and go anywhere. Nearly all disappeared. As it turns out, the scruffy looking guy I saw, riding one bike and steering another with his free hand, wasn't collecting and returning them in the whee hours of the morning. The new bikes had GPS attached, but they limited the numbers, due the theft. Those slowly disappeared, too. Last I saw, there were just a few bikes at each bike rack, compared to maybe 50 at each.
SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
A few years ago my wife had her registered bicycle stolen after I screwed up and left the garage open. We reported it stolen and only took 3 days for it to make its way back to us. It made its way back to us because the cops stopped someone for looking like they too nice of a bike, so that's a whole other problem, but registration works.

InCityDreams 4y ago

Amazon do bike alarms. $16? Kind of intended for motorbikes(?) but when i turn then both on - one wedged under the seat and another less permanently attached - the conversations generated guarantee me onlookers (bar/ cafe) almost look after the bike for me. Decent lock, too. Drop the chain off and whack it out of gear (it hurts if you forget). If im inside and i see someone checking out thd bike i 'test' the alarm.

kuschku 4y ago

Honestly (at least from my experiences in Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Essen, and Kiel): As long as your bike isn’t super expensive (e.g., I’ve got this: https://boc24.de/products/bocas-bari-trapez https://boc24.de/products/bocas-bari-trapez) and you’ve locked it with a lock that’s resistant to bolt cutters (even something as simple as https://www.kaufland.de/product/313003426/ https://www.kaufland.de/product/313003426/), it’s not going to get stolen. Even if you’ve locked it overnight for multiple days at the main train station (tested in Düsseldorf and Kiel), it’s going to be fine.

ClumsyPilot 4y ago
About locks - nobody ever picks locks, only brute force is used. If the lock is a cable lock, it's worthless. If the lock is solid metal over 5mm, it can only be cut by angle grinder. Once you are in angle grinder territory, whether it's 5mm or 15mm doesn't seem to matter. So i think there is no point spending over $100 on a lock. Additionaly, you can use a hydrawlick jack to break d-locks, but that doesnt work on chains and is very dependant on how exactly you locked up
- yonaguska 4y ago
  And smaller locks are trendy now because it's much harder to use an angle grinder on a tiny u-lock without sawing through something else.

ClumsyPilot 4y ago

there are quite a few trackers, but I don't know how much they help you in recovering the bike https://pimpmybikeretail.co.uk/product/sherlock-bike-tracker-bike-gps-bicycle-tracker/ https://pimpmybikeretail.co.uk/product/sherlock-bike-tracker...

solardev 4y ago

These are great, light u-lock style frame locks made of titanium: https://tigrlock.com/ https://tigrlock.com/ Your wheels and components might still get stolen, but not much is really going to stop that. You can add a cable lock if you really want to but they're easy to cut through. Bike registration (https://bikeindex.org/ https://bikeindex.org/) might help in some circumstances. But really, insurance is the thing that will cover you. Many renters'/homeowners' insurances will cover theft of bikes too, even when you're away from home, so you don't necessarily need supplemental bike insurance. The thing about the trackers is that they're for after-the-fact recovery, not deterrent (especially if they're stealth). It's just going to get parted out, so if you're lucky you might recover the frame and not much else.

markvdb 4y ago

Getting a good quality folding bicycle (Brompton!) may be even easier. Just take it inside with you.