Bike Theft Q&A : July Edition

(This is a recap of our July “Annie Answers” column from the Project 529 blog. Read on to learn about quick release skewers, “abandoned” U-locks, law enforcement priorities and GPS bike trackers.)

QR skewers: Helping bike thieves for 90 years!

Dear Annie,

Someone made off with my front wheel and I’m really angry. It’s not that it was a particularly nice wheel, but I did find it very helpful while riding. I don’t understand — why steal just a below average wheel? I went to craigslist to try and find my wheel, or just to buy a replacement, but there aren’t a lot of wheels up there so it doesn’t look like they’re stealing them to sell them. What gives, and what can I do to protect my replacement?

- Wheel-less In Sacramento, Help!

WISH,

Ah, yes. This situation is known as the dreaded “bike prowl” — where a thief picks a piece or two off of your bike, leaving the owner stranded and with a sometimes difficult replacement situation.

There’s a lot of bike theft behaviors that I can’t explain, but this one is pretty easy.

Bike thieves “prowl” bikes for parts to build complete bikes. The most common situation comes about when two compatible bikes in close proximity are locked differently, enabling a thief to quickly assemble a complete bike. Since the 80’s, most road- or commuter-style bikes standardized on wheel sizes and fitted bikes with “Quick Release” (or QR) skewers to allow for rapid, tool-less removal of wheels for transport or repair. The design also helps the rider apply added torque to secure the wheel without risk of stripping hardware. This nifty invention is a great convenience that thieves capitalize on.

The scenario plays out like this. The rider of a “red bike” locks their frame and rear wheel with a high-quality lock to a secure rack. The rider of a “blue bike” is less familiar with proper locking and simply locks their front wheel to a rack nearby. Both are equipped with QR skewers. The thief simply liberates the front wheel of the red bike and walks over to the blue bike, wheel in hand. A few turns of the blue QR liberates everything but the front wheel of the blue bike, they install the red wheel and ride away!

You’ll occasionally also see bicycles from time to time without saddles. QR seat clamps also became popular, to allow a rider to make small adjustments in the saddle height conveniently without tools. A popular anti-theft tactic that emerged around the same time was for an owner to release their saddle in an attempt to deter theft — sometimes not locking the bike at all! Of course, the same scenario plays out here where the thief simply liberates the saddle from a nearby bike, inserts it into the unlocked bike and rolls away.

The good news is that there is a line of defense against QR-based bike prowls. The best is to get rid of the QR hardware on your bike! In general, the category of products that are designed to replace the QR components standard on most bikes are referred to as locking skewers. Most urban bike shops these days will carry at least one solution and will be able to share some opinions. In my personal research and usage, I’ve landed on 3 products that I like, each with strengths and weaknesses.

The cheap-and-easy approach is to get some bolt-on skewers that require tools. An inexpensive option is the Delta Axolrodz Bolt-On Hub Skewers, but there are several others out there that are similar. While different variants require different tools, they all work on the same basic principle — by removing the QR, you’re adding risk and complexity for the quick-and-casual tool-free prowl. The downside is that most pros are going to have the tools in their bag to defeat it, so if they have the time and want the wheel, it’s still quite easy.

The next level is to go with a keyed locking skewer. These are skewers which require specialized tools that are paired (somewhat) uniquely to the specific hardware on the bike. In this category, we’re fans of the Pinhead Bicycle Locking Skewers. What’s terrific about this approach is that the keyed hardware allows to protect wheels, saddle and stem/fork all with a single approach and key. The downside to these keyed approaches is that you need the key to change a flat, so it’s something else to carry. (PS: Don’t leave it in a saddlebag like one recent victim reported having done!). Another thing to consider is that if you have multiple bikes, you’ll need to have different keys for different bikes.

The newest product to the party is the ABUS NutFix Quick Release Bicycle Wheel Skewers which fall into the category of gravity locked skewers. This clever category essentially requires your bike to be rotated into a specific orientation (upside-down or sideways) in order for the skewer to release. One problem with this category is that most of the solutions have essentially been QR skewers that only function if upside-down. The problem this introduces is that the skewers appear to be QR and therefore thieves (and sometimes mechanics) will try to release the wheel, often destroying the skewer. ABUS combines gravity with bolt-on, hiding the hardware with caps that can only be removed with the bike laying on its side. While an elegant solution (that even comes in multiple colors), these too are imperfect. First, rotating the bike might be possible depending on what you’ve secured to. Second, you need to carry a tool to fix a flat.

ABUS NutFix QR Skewers

Another approach to defeat the prowl is the accessory cable which is essentially a cable lock with a loop on each end that can be secured to your primary lock and then can be looped through the saddle or front wheel. This can buy a little bit of time over the QR by requiring the thief to clip the cable before releasing the wheel or saddle. Remember though that the primary tool of the trade is bolt cutters! There’s a slew of DIY solutions out there are well, one of the more popular is using an old bike chain as a tether between your saddle rails and rear triangle to prevent a saddle from walking off.

The final note on locking skewers is to consult with a bike mechanic or manufacturer if you’re unsure if these products are appropriate for your bike. It’s very important to make sure that you torque the skewers appropriately to keep the wheels safely affixed (taking care not to strip the hardware).

WISH, hope this answers your question and that you’re rolling again soon!

- Annie

Unlocking the lonely U-lock mystery

Annie -

I’ve been trying to a better job with my bike locking since my brother’s bike got stolen last year. I think I have a pretty good sense for how thieves take advantage of bad locking practices, but what I’ve been confused when I see U-locks on the racks with no bikes. I visited Seattle last month and it seems these solo locks are everywhere. Is the ghost of Harry Houdini liberating bikes to impress us?

- Left Behind in Seattle

Left Behind,

I think I can shed light on this mystery for you.

It’s very rare that a thief will take the time to pick a lock at the rack, so you’re likely not seeing trophies of liberated bikes. More likely, you are simply seeing “left behind” U-locks. They aren’t being left behind by thieves, they are left behind by their owners. Why, you ask? Often because they are commuters who use that rack daily for parking their bike while they are at work or at school.

Back in the day, this was a protocol to “reserve” a preferred spot, an unwritten signal to cyclists to grab a different space if one is available. Early on, it also was a way to avoid transporting these new, heavy and awkward locks while riding.

While on the surface there isn’t anything wrong with leaving a lock at your daily destination, I discourage the practice for a couple of reasons:

• First, leaving a lock behind “at work” for most means that you probably don’t have that lock “at home.” This leaves your bike vulnerable where it is parked most frequently. As we see about 40% of bikes stolen from private residences, often unlocked, we always promote locking at home.
• Leaving your lock behind on the ride home doesn’t let you secure your bike if anything comes up during the commute. An emergency bio (or beer) stop can leave you in a situation with no lock to secure your ride.
• The weather can be unkind to locks when left outdoors for extended periods. Depending on the construction, moisture entering the lock cylinder or body can promote deterioration and potentially leave you in a situation where you either cannot lock your bike or you cannot unlock it when you need it.
• Thieves sometimes exploit this practice and may potentially target your bike as a result. A thief spotting a weak “left behind” lock or weakened rack might note it as a potential target. Why? Because the bike is likely to be parked unmonitored for extended periods during days.
• Another exploit involves thieves rendering the lock unusable — by say filling the cylinder with superglue or breaking off toothpicks. If you roll up to the office, late for a meeting and your lock doesn’t work, a likely remedy would be to buy a cheap cable lock and solve the problem with the U-lock later.

Given modern U-locks that aren’t nearly as heavy and have good mounting options, I definitely recommend that the serious commuter always have a good lock on-hand when rolling. A great commuter lock is the ABUS 640 Mini, it comes with a frame mount and can even fit in a back jeans pocket.

- Annie

Are police doing enough about bike theft?

Dear Annie,

I reported my bike stolen with 529 a few weeks ago. I got an e-mail in response from 529 telling me to file a police report. My police department only takes reports by phone and I gave up after being on hold for over 10 minutes. Why should we bother to report it to police when they obviously don’t prioritize recovering bikes and I’ve already filed it with you?

- Mad in Freemont.

MIFfed,

I hear you… being put on extended hold is a close second to bike theft on my frustrate-o-meter. But, in this case, I have to encourage you to wait out that Muzak and report it missing.

While it’s correct that law enforcement have much more pressing issues than bike theft, most agencies do care about the problem more than cyclists believe. It’s a quality-of-life issue for their community and stolen bikes are often used as vehicles to commit additional crimes. For these reasons, and because bikes are frequently fenced in bulk, police do seize an incredible number of bikes — it’s not uncommon for major city to recover 1,000 or 2,000 bikes per year.

Now, that’s not to say a fleet of squad cars are going to be dispatched “code 3” when you report that your Kona Dr. Dew got clipped — that’s not how it works. But, there is a double-digit chance that your stolen bike will be recovered by a police department — that’s pretty good. While there’s more police can do, candidly, the cycling community isn’t doing their part.

There’s a number of reasons why it’s important to report your missing bike to the local authorities:

• If it’s not reported, it “didn’t happen.” At 529, we estimate that only 1-in-5 bike thefts are reported to police. Prioritization is going to be determined by the scale of the problem. There’s a big difference between 3,000 and 15,000 bikes reported missing in a large city.
• Better data and analysis of problems in the community. In most major metros, all crime patterns are analyzed which helps determine the policing strategy on the streets. If a particular area is lighting up for property/bike crime, police will patrol that area more frequently, possibly add cameras, add it to bike patrol routes, etc.
• You’re not getting your bike back (or an insurance claim) without a report. Property office policy is pretty strict in even small communities in terms of returning recovered property. If you don’t have a police report and proof of ownership, that bike will never be returned.

Odds are that reporting the crime is going to help the community more than it’s going to help you, but it can help the cycling community in the future. Want to help yourself? Register your bike. The biggest problem with the bikes recovered by the police is finding the owner of the bike.

Portland Police Bureau’s property office. Over 95% of these bikes will not be returned to their owners.

All police departments will run the serial number for a match against police reports made in their jurisdiction. Most will also run it against the federal NCIC database which attempts to merge all of the reported crimes. Unfortunately, only about 2% of bikes recovered by the police are returned to owners. This is because owners don’t report and often if they do, they don’t report serial numbers. No serial number? No result. It’s as frustrating for the police as it is for victims. No one at a police agency is happy about recovering 2,000+ bikes a year and to see 98% of them go to auction or charity!

If you register your bike with 529 Garage, you’ll capture all of the key details police will need to know to match a found bike back to you. It also allows you to activate the local cycling community. As one police officer in Vancouver is fond of saying, “Would you rather have a couple dozen cops looking for your bike or a couple thousand cyclists?” Finally, because our search allows for partial or close match serial numbers as well as searching by make, model, color and location, we have a higher probability of getting a match than just a serial number search.

While searching bikes on 529 Garage is far from standard in North American policing, we’re getting more traction everyday. We have had over 2,000 police agencies that have searched for missing bikes on 529 Garage and more and more agencies coming onboard to make it a common practice in their department. Even at 600,000 bikes in our database — the largest of any system of its kind — the more bikes in the database, the more police will want to use it.

So, please do your part and register your bikes — it just takes 5 minutes and will let you record everything you need to stack the odds of getting your bike back or at least maximize your insurance claim. And if you are victimized by theft, do file a police report with your local agency.

- Annie

GPS — The bike theft silver bullet?

Dear Annie,

I left my iPhone on the bus last winter and recovered it using the “Find my iPhone” feature from my computer. Seems that doing the same kind of thing for bikes would be the best possible solution to help recover a stolen bike. Why doesn’t 529 just add “Find my Bike” to their app and sell GPS trackers for bikes?

- Satellites Over Land — Very Easy Decision

SOLVED,

I wish it were that easy. Between the chips, antennae, software and billions in R&D that Apple has sunk into the iPhone to pinpoint location, the iPhone is one of the top consumer GPS solutions out there. So, adding a Find My iPhone feature for them was a pretty practical and inexpensive addition — no doubt it’s helped a ton of people who have misplaced their phones.

So what don’t we do it? The short answer is complexity, affordability, vigilantism and impact.

The long answer?

Well, there’s a lot of technical and practical challenges in making GPS work well on a bike:

• Power consumption / battery life. The iPhone battery is about a third of the volume of the iPhone and half the weight… and you recharge it daily! You’ve also probably also learned that GPS is one of the more power-hungry features of the phone. So, getting a reasonable sized device that has good battery life is a real challenge. It’s important not just to avoid having to always charge your bike, but also to have sufficient battery to track it if it goes missing for a few days.
• Network providers. Like the iPhone, a GPS tracker is going to need to have cellular network connectivity. There are a lot of different cellular standards and providers that have different coverage maps in North America. The owner is going to want the best coverage in their area for the lowest price. Building one affordable device that can work everywhere and has reasonable data plan costs is a challenge to build and test.
• Size. Again, the iPhone has a huge advantage here as it is designed around communications and has space for antennae to connect to the cellular and GPS networks effectively. Building a device that is concealable, or reasonably concealable for a bicycle, that performs well is going to be hard.
• Weatherproofing. Not until the 7th generation iPhone, 10 years later did Apple introduce a water-resistant iPhone. If you’re a Pacific Northwest commuter like I am, you’d appreciate the water, grit, grease and knocks that a bike can take. Any product to help protect a bike needs to be as tough as the bike itself.
• Performance. Anyone that has worked in the microelectronics space, dealt with EMI challenges and antennae performance will tell you that trying to hide something like this inside a bike frame or handlebar and getting great results is going to be a tricky problem to solve.

So, is it impossible to create an iPhone-quality GPS tracker for bikes? No. But, you’re going to need a strong team, healthy budget and a lot engineering time and testing. Have a look at the Garmin lineup of bike GPS devices (they make a lot of GPS products for many categories) to get a sense for the size, pricing & complexity for a device in this category that meets these goals.

Assuming a budget and team that can clear the technical hurdles, there’s then the practical challenges to consider:

• Concealment / tamper-proofing. If the thief can easily remove the device and say, toss it into the bed of a pickup, it’s not going to be super helpful. Creating a form factor that can be used with a commuter bike, a triathalon bike, a downhill bike and a cargo bike that satisfies this (and performs well) is not simple.
• Precision. The precision of GPS is pretty good when it comes to knowing what street you’re on and what direction you’re traveling — this helps a ton for map applications on your phone. However, it’s not very helpful in a lot of places where stolen bikes often end up. A blue dot over a storage facility, apartment complex or parking garage doesn’t provide the precision to locate the floor, apartment, or storage unit that a bike is contained in. This is why “bait bikes” will also generally be equipped with an RF (radio frequency) solution as well so the police can pinpoint a bike’s location.
• Law enforcement. If you ask experienced law enforcement personnel, you’ll get mixed responses on how they feel about products like LoJack, OnStar and Find my iPhone and how they are to deal with from a law-enforcement perspective (more in a minute). And, unlike a motor vehicle, most bike thefts will be “sub felony” because of the lower value of the bike and impact the prioritization and effort they are willing to put in.
• Vigilantism. Bike theft can be an emotional crime for victims and having a moving”blue dot” to chase on their phone, for some, may be too tempting to not act on their own. This could lead to a much more dangerous experience and outcome than the initial theft of the bike.
• Detection. While too commonly, cyclists (and law enforcement) often consider bike thieves as unsophisticated, it is not terribly difficult, or expensive, to detect if a device is broadcasting over a network. Using a scanner, bike thieves can determine if a stolen bike is “transmitting” and likely disable the transmission very quickly.

At this risk of being a “Debbie Downer,” it’s also important to think through the police side of the equation when it comes to getting a bike back based on location information. While an episode of CSI or watching Minority Report might suggest that police cars and officers are all setup to chase moving blue dots on maps, IRL it’s not quite that simple. While I’m not an expert here, I have spent enough time with police to provide a general sense of some of the challenges they might face in helping you.

In general, all agencies are going to require a theft report (with at least a serial number) before taking any action. At that point, they will prioritize the crime relative to other incidents called in. Assuming the provider of your GPS hasn’t worked with your local law enforcement to integrate their software with dispatch (this would be an incredible amount of work), they are going to be relying on you telling them where the blue dot is, and likely wait for you to report that the blue dot has been stationary for some period of time (say, 30 minutes).

Even then, assuming you have an exact address of a single unit dwelling or structure for them to work with, you have the Constitution to consider. The police can’t just break down a door because there’s a blue dot on a bike theft victim’s phone. If the bike is on private property and the owner / resident is non-compliant, they will then need a warrant to enter the premises to search for the bike. Of course, protocols and procedures vary from agency-to-agency, but as a rule of thumb, you shouldn’t believe that the police are going to download a smartphone app and start chase down a bike thief 3 minutes after your bike goes missing.

In our analysis of this category as something that was a good fit for our company, we decided a few things:

• First, customer and partners’ safety should be prioritized above all else. We hate the idea that anyone would get hurt over a stolen bike and knew it was impossible to prevent vigilante behavior with a real-time tracker.
• We didn’t have the budget or experience to tackle this and deliver a high-performance product.
• Given the practical hurdles, the scope of impact this type of product could have on bike theft is limited, and likely biases the more fortunate riders out there. We wanted our solution to have the broadest possible impact on the most cyclists, regardless of income or value of bike

None of this is to say that GPS on a bike is impossible or not useful. There’s a lot of terrific applications for integrated GPS that I’d love to see (like mapping, performance tracking, route optimization, safety to name a few), and I’m bullish in particular of the potential when integrated with e-bikes.

10 years from now, it’s quite likely that a large percentage of $1,000 bikes on the market will have integrated GPS as costs go down, manufacturers get onboard and some of the engineering hurdles are overcome by some players who have kept with it. That’s all good news, and I’m definitely looking forward to the innovations that integrated GPS could bring to cycling.

- Annie