I knew a person who airtagged their bike before it was stolen, drove to where it was and visually confirmed it, then reported it to the police who said “Nothing I can do.”
Just grab the bike and fuck up anyone who tries to stop you from retrieving your property then.
That is actually how that story ends, haha.
Fuck yeah!
Because there isn’t in most cases.
In cases of confrontation/bike recovery you have to have proof of ownership and you have to proof of theft.
Also in a big city dept, they simple don’t care about petty theft.
My police department has a registry of bikes by photo and serial number. If registered, they can return stolen bikes.
do they give a fuck? Nah.
not surprising at all. They take up very little room, so they are relatively easy to move, can be taken apart within less than an hour and parted out, often are locked inadequately, many establishments lack good/any bike racks in areas with decent foot traffic to deter crimes of opportunity . . . . . .
I am planning on building a decent 29er, that will be expensive enough to warrant designing some custom gps tracking solution so that if it ever is stolen, I can at least track it in real time. But I’ve had bikes stolen before, and from experience, having a bike locked in a safe, road-facing location for less than a few hours at a time is the best way, where I live, to avoid the pain of losing something so useful forever.
the ideal solution is to provide actual locked bike storage shacks/shelters in busy areas, but cities will sooner waste millions on horrid road infrastructure than anything to negate the fears that potential cyclists have about bicycle theft.
I was in Denmark over a decade ago for an extended time and everyone just had a plain black bike that all looked alike for everyday use, I did see some nice road bikes but they were being used for leisure.
I only rented bikes so I don’t know how much they were but I’m assuming they weren’t expensive to replace and probably not worth stealing.
Why would you ever leave such a bike out in public such that it gets stolen?
because, I’m a human that makes mistakes.
In London?
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A bike for a bike leaves the world on foot.
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Street Bike theft is a trivial crime that isn’t worth wasting resources on. Most bikes are petty larceny unless they are $1000+ and that is the value of the bike at the time of theft, not the fact you paid $3000 for it 5 years ago.
Typically when the police are involved it’s organized crime situations of mass bike theft from shops or containers that bring much higher chargers.
The lost value of bike theft is not the value of the bike. It’s way worse the value of the perceived safety.
For every bike that is stolen, tens of people hear how city X is full of bike thieves, deterring them from buying a bike themselves. Which results in more cars and less bikes. Which is very damaging. Way worse than the price of the bike.
There are multiple cases of individual bike thefts being connected to larger organized crime groups. Of course, we often only know that because of investigations by people who aren’t police.
The case you are linking to involves $5000+ bikes. That’s not petty theft, that’s similar to car theft. The crime is already grand larceny per theft. Of course with that amount of money people are going to be way more motivated, and it’s going to be a small subset of very wealthy enthusiasts. The vast majority of bikes people ride and that get stolen are in the $100 range, usually by homeless people who part them out for scrap metal to get money for drugs. In my city any homeless encampment has piles of stolen bikes that are torn apart because the alloy parts are what they can scrap for some decent money. The steel is worthless.
