Bike Theft Q&A : June Edition
(This is a recap of our June “Annie Answers” column from the Project 529 blog. Read on to learn about choosing the right lock, buying used bikes online, our thoughts on bike licensing and the risks of indoor bike parking.)
Choosing a bike lock: The careful balance of material, strength and pick defense.
Dear Annie,
I just moved to Austin after graduation from a small New England school where I rode my bike everywhere. It’s clear that bike theft is a big issue here and I definitely need to upgrade my lock. I’ve spent some time on Amazon and the web researching U-locks and I’m more confused than I was when I started. What’s the difference between a $25 and a $250 lock? What the heck do all of these security ratings mean? Help!
- Confused in Austin
Confused,
You’re hardly alone in your confusion. There’s a lot of options in the bike lock category and a lot of companies playing in the space. While I could write a full chapter on this topic, I do have a couple of basic suggestions that might help.
The first thing that we need to get out of the way is that any lock can be defeated with the enough time and the right tools. So, when you’re shopping for a lock, you’re basically looking to maximize the “time to defeat” within your budget.
When it comes to the ratings on the packaging — these are determined by the manufacturer and really only help when comparing locks from the same company. On the Kryptonite scale, we recommend a rating of 6 or higher. For ABUS, start with at least an 8. There are other ratings from independent testing houses — Sold Secure, ART and Thatcham are the most popular, but little is published about their methodology or the actual testing or results of the product. So, mostly, these are useful from knowing that the manufacturers have done their diligence with independent testing agencies.
The second thing to emphasize is to never rely on a cable lock as a primary security device for your bike. Cables take only seconds to cut through with $20 bolt cutters. We see over a third of bike thefts reported to us resulting from a compromised cable. Never trust a cable under any circumstances!
I would suggest looking at U-locks or folding locks in terms of the lock design. While every design involves compromise, these offer a good balance of protection, convenience and price. Assuming you primarily will be securing your bike to a bike rack, these types of locks will generally do the trick and have seen the most engineering evolution.
In terms of price, generally there are 3 design factors which contribute to “time to defeat” — material, strength and pick defense.
Look for a lock made of hardened steel and a diameter of at least 12mm. Under 12mm and the U-lock can often be cut with large bolt cutters! From a strength perspective, you’ll want to make sure that the shackle of the U-lock “double bolts” — meaning that both sides of the “U” lock into the base. This means that the thief will need to cut the lock twice to release the bike. Another consideration is shackle length (or the length of the “U”). I recommend buying the shortest shackle compatible with locking your frame and wheel to a bike rack — this limits the space the thief has to work with. Combining these factors, our minimum lock recommendation for urban settings is the ABUS 410 Mini.
In terms of key design, you’ll want to go with a keyed lock and avoid combo locks. While combo locks are convenient, and the 9,999 possible combos sound difficult to defeat, there’s techniques that allow thieves to unlock these quickly (have a browse around YouTube if you need more convincing). Many of the higher-end locks will come with more sophisticated keys making the lock more difficult to pick, but lock picking is a pretty rare thing out on today’s streets.
Finally, convenience is also an important consideration. Think about how you’re planning to transport the lock. Will it generally be in a bag? Do you want to have it mounted to the bike? Do you plan to use it with multiple bikes? Does shaking the lock cause it to rattle and will that bother you? If your bike has water bottle braze-ons that you’re not using, we really like the mounting design of the ABUS Bordo line, it’s a very convenient mounting system, quiet and you can even order additional mounts for multiple bikes.
Hopefully this is a good start on navigating the complicated world of bike locks. I definitely recommend getting hands on with the products out there at your local bike shop and getting some additional advice from the local experts. And always make sure to register your bike so that you have everything you need to get the word out if they do defeat your lock.
- Annie
Avoid buying a stolen bike when shopping used.
Dear Annie,
Some jerk with a hacksaw cut through my porch railing and took my new commuter bike. My renter’s insurance deductible was $1,000, so I’m out $800 and I can’t afford to replace it new. I plan to buy a used bike, but I fear that everything on craigslist is stolen. What can I do to make sure that the bike is clear so that I’m not helping create demand for stolen bikes?
- Hacked Off in Portland
Hacked Off,
Boy do I wish most theft victims and craigslist buyers were as vigilant as you! While you’re correct that many stolen bikes do end up on sites like craigslist and eBay, there’s also a lot of legitimate cyclists trying to clear out their garage and pass along a good deal on a good ride. Here’s a few tips on how you can keep things legitimate:
Inspect the ad for clues. Stolen bike listings often look pretty legitimate, but there are a couple of signs you can look for that suggest it might not be on the up-and-up. Beware of stock (or poor quality) photos posted to hide or disguise identifying marks or unique components. Poor spelling, or deliberately misspelled manufacturers (e.g., “Fiji” instead of “Fuji”) or model names are used to throw off the scent of victims. Thin information about the bike can also be a warning sign.
Is the price too good to be true? If the ad looks pretty good, check around for similar bikes and see what the going price is on other used sites. You can also try Bicycle Blue Book for a reference price. If the price is really low, it’s definitely something you’ll want to probe on.
Research the seller. Some sites like eBay and OfferUp offer decent tools to look into the seller’s seller history and ratings. Are they a brand new seller with no ratings? Do they have lots of bikes for sales with similarly suspicious descriptions? If the seller looks bad, stay away — and be sure to report your suspicion to the site you found them on.
Ask tough questions online. Legitimate sellers are willing to answer detailed questions and will put time into quality responses. Inquire about any red flags from the ad or the seller. Ask them for any specific details about the bike that an owner should know — how long they’ve had it, where they bought it, when the last repair was and what it was. If it still feels good, go ahead and ask for the serial number of the bike and take a full screenshot of the ad and print it out.
Ask more questions in person. If all is well with your initial investigation, go ahead and schedule a meet. Make sure to get the seller’s phone number and setup the meeting in a well-lit public place and bring a friend along if at all possible. Be sure to look for any discrepancies from the online posting (you brought the printout of the ad right?) and ask about it. Look specifically for any scratches or dents on the frame that could be signs of force used to remove a lock. Take it for a test ride and run the serial number and description on 529 Garage. If it all feels good, make the buy and ask for a Bill of Sale from the seller.
At any point in the process you come across a bike or seller that is fishy, be sure to report them to the site and to screenshot the entire ad so that you can provide it back to the site or the police if need be.
While this seems like overkill in today’s convenience economy, this is an appropriate level of detail to get into on a used bike. If you’re saving a few hundred dollars, the extra time is worth it and in nearly all cities, if you are in possession of a stolen bike, the police can seize it from you without reimbursing you for your outlay. For this reason, I strongly recommend getting a dated bill of sale and immediately register your bike with 529 Garage to make sure that you have a record of ownership.
Of course, you can always skip the general reseller sites and go to either an online reseller that specializes in bikes (we’re fans of The Pro’s Closet), or visit a local shop that specializes in used bikes. You won’t get the same selection, but resellers specializing in bikes generally take extra steps to make sure that the bikes are clean and will also make sure that they are safe and in good condition!
- Annie
The “bike licensing” debate: an infinite loop?
Dear Annie,
I feel like registration the 529 Shield is a good idea for my bike, but in doing some research it seems that a lot of advocacy groups have actively fought against bike licensing? Some even say that adding a sticker like that gives the police additional grounds to pull you over or hassle you — like bell or helmet laws. What’s the straight story?
- Conflicted by my advocate friends
Conflicted,
I feel you. When I first started researching bike theft, I was surprised to hear how many different cities and organizations have nearly come to blows over the “bike licensing” topic over the last 30 years!
Given that one of the biggest contributors to bike theft is the lack of registration, it would seem to make a lot of sense to add the requirement that every new bike is registered. After all, every other vehicle that we put on our roads, waterways and skies is registered at point-of-sale and the police don’t struggle at all with returning found vehicles to owners.
However, after spending a lot of time talking to folks on both sides of the problem, I think I’ve come to understand why this has become such a volatile topic in communities and the logic behind the arguments.
First, there is some sloppy terminology in terms of what is actually meant when many of these proposals are socialized. I’ll use 3 distinct terms to frame the problem: bicycle registration (ownership), bicycle licensing (usage fee) and bicyclist licensing (qualifications). Oftentimes these different concepts get lumped into one loose proposal, and often in response to a single, often public situation. Without taking a position on any of the arguments, I’ll try to lay out what I’ve heard and seen.
Advocacy groups pushing hard to get more people cycling argue strongly that an annual bike licensing fee via will restrict ridership and that other municipal taxes more than cover the road usage costs. And, if the fee is modest enough to prevent this (say $10 annually), that the cost of collection will nullify any real revenue to contribute to infrastructure. The counter-point is that many cities are pouring millions into infrastructure like secure parking, protected lanes and safe bike routes and that some of that money should be coming from the folks that benefit the most from its development.
Bicyclist licensing generally receives a more hostile response from the cycling community. “At what age do we test?” “Are we going to pull over grade schoolers for not using hand signals?” “Who is going to pay for an administer the test?” “Cars kill, bikes don’t. That’s why we test the operators of autos.” No matter which side of the argument you are on, it is pretty clear that the logistics of a testing system and meaningful enforcement would be quite complicated in most communities.
Of the 3, bicycle registration is typically the least offensive generally, and one that could really help with bicycle theft and recovery efforts. However, there are a lot of challenges with compulsory bicycle registration that makes it a tough pill to swallow when you start getting into the logistics of the problem. Here’s a some of the challenges that need to be worked through:
- Most bills are regional and not state or federal in scope. And, most cyclists traverse city and state lines with their bicycles. So, if you’re trying to solve the bike theft problem (we know that many if not most stolen bikes are sold outside of the city they are stolen in), to have a positive impact, you need to have a broader geographic radius than most proposals suggest.
- On the enforcement front, are visiting riders and tourists required to register their bikes when passing through? Is there a “grandfather period” for existing bikes in the market? Is there a certain vintage or value of bike that is not required to be registered? These logistics topics are rarely ever addressed by proposed bills.
- In terms of point-of-sale registration (like cars, jetskis and motorcycles), the bike channel is much, much broader. In fact, most bike sales in the US and Canada actually source not from bike shops (who sell less than 20%), but from national “big box” retailers like Wal-Mart, Target, Big 5, REI, MEC and Canadian Tire. Unlike a car dealer or motorcycle shop that designed their point-of-sale system with registration in mind, retrofitting dozens of computer systems with a new concept is a non-trivial task. And, to achieve 100% compliance, you’re going to need the national retailers to get onboard. Few cities are going to have the political clout, or invest the efforts to make this happen with the big nationals.
- Registration is just one half of the computer system problem, the other half of the problem is the need for all of the licensing and enforcement constituencies to be able to “run a plate”. This means integration with the police computer systems, training dispatch, parking enforcement systems, etc. If you think about all of the computer systems that have a “license plate” field in them, well, those are all of the systems that you are going to need to fix for a city to be able to enforce the program.
- Enforcement policy is a tricky one as well. Are police cars going to start pulling over bikes? Are we going to have “plates” large-enough-to-read-from-cars attached to bikes (how and where?). Does the rider of an unregistered bicycle get ticketed or is it the shop that sold it? If the latter, how is that proven?
- Turning to the Internet — a huge number of bike sales happen online through bike dealers and used marketplaces. Are all online sellers going to be required to register a bike shipping to city X? What about used marketplace sellers on craigslist, OfferUp and eBay? How about a bike shop in city X with a strong Internet business?
- Then there’s the education, awareness and promotion component. What agency is charged with the education, enforcement and general choreography of the program? A typical city will have over 100 outlets where bicycles are sold — who is responsible for educating these businesses, helping them make the transition, developing education material, raising awareness of the program, working with bicycle clubs and programs to get the word out, etc. The DMV services this need (in the US) for most vehicle licensing and would be the likely “host” for such a program. Consider the physical retrofit of these facilities not designed to accommodate bicycles either outside or inside.
- Finally, consider the challenge with registering 100,000’s of existing bicycles in a given city where owners no longer have any proof of ownership, bikes have changed hands… not to mention there’s no standard VIN like system for bicycles making even the capture of correct serial numbers challenging — and virtually no chance of validation of them (unlike other vehicles).
In the end, passing a compulsory registration bill is the easiest part of the equation (perhaps this is what makes it popular with lawmakers). Logistically, there’s an enormous amount of work and cost associated with making it happen. We know, because that’s what we’ve been trying to do with voluntary registration in our partner communities.
The silver lining in all of this is that bike riders, shops and clubs all do want to tackle the bike theft problem and will engage on voluntary registration programs as we’ve seen in many partner cities now. We’re big believers that asking people to help is a better first step than telling people what to do.
For all of these reasons, we started with a voluntary bicycle registration movement and providing terrific tools to everyone in the ecosystem to make bike registration easy and are compelled to stick with it as the right approach for the time being. Does it work? You bet! In Vancouver, we’ve seen a 35% reduction of bike theft reports in the last year and a doubling of stolen bike reunions. These results would have been impossible without the support of about 50 bike shops in Vancouver helping out — but because they were asked.
- Annie
Bike theft stinks: from the inside and out.
Dear Annie,
We have a shared bike parking and storage area in my apartment complex. We just got a note from the management company that thieves broke in and grabbed six bikes overnight! I was lucky not to be one of them, but I thought for sure cameras would keep them at bay. I fear my bike is going to be next — what can I do?
- High Stress in my high-rise
High Stress,
I wish I could tell you that this was the first I’ve heard of this kind of situation, but it’s more common than you might expect. Over one third of all stolen bike reports 529 receives are from residences — private and shared garages, bike parkades and even from balconies! Never assume your bike is safe because there are physical barriers or cameras between it and the street.
Garages are high on the list for bike thieves for a number of reasons.
First, it’s often easy pickings — its rare for an owner, even in a shared parking space to lock their bikes. The outer door of the garage, and possibly cameras often give bike owners a false sense of security — “certainly no bike thief would go through the risk of being caught on camera or the hassle of getting through the big, heavy door, right?” Bike thieves are often very brazen — and a ski mask and black hoodie is generally enough to make even HD security cameras pretty useless (especially since garage cameras are often placed to capture vehicle movements and not human movements).
Since most garages usually contain multiple bikes, they’re also a terrific place for thieves to “shop” — whether looking for the most expensive bike, or hauling multiple bikes in one visit. They’re also great places to “work” without detection — sometimes with a nice box of tools right within reach!
Ask yourself — how likely is it that a quiet thief working in a private garage whose door was left open overnight going to get caught in the wee hours? How often is your apartment complex’s bike room visited at 3am? Heck, many bike cages actually have a power outlet in them — providing 110V to power that angle grinder in the thief’s backpack. Bike cages in particular are frequented by organized thieves that we’ve seen haul as many as a dozen bikes in under 20 minutes! That can easily be $10–15,000 on the black market — not bad for an hours’ work.
Fortunately, there’s a couple of things that you can do to defend your 2 wheeled chariot. The first is to always lock your bike when you aren’t riding it. This seems like a silly suggestion, but you’d be amazed at how often riders won’t take the 30 seconds to secure a bike in many situations. Even if you don’t have something solid to secure it to, at least disable the bike by locking one of the wheels to the frame. This will force the thief to carry the bike, or remove the lock with tools — adding inconvenience and risk of detection. Locking it to even a weak structure — like a table leg or fencing in a bike cage can add thieving time and might discourage the thief.
For a home garage, definitely consider adding a security camera to your garage. You can work with a security company to install these, or look into DIY solutions like Nest and Drop cameras which are easy to install, have night vision capability, will send alerts to your phone and are accessible over the Internet from your smartphone. Simple signage or stickers that the garage is being monitored is not a terrible idea either. While most thieves are often pretty brazen, private garage theft is often more a crime of opportunity — a door left open overnight for example — so they’re likely to choose a non-camera alternative if one exists. Finally, you could also look into concrete floor anchors that you can use to lock the bike to the floor.
For an indoor bike parking area in an apartment, condo or business, “think like a thief” and investigate the security around the bike cage and the access to it. Sadly, bike cages are often after-thoughts in these environments and add very little actual physical security. For example, in my apartment, I can access the bike cage with a coat hanger in under 15 seconds. Bring up your findings to your building manager and see what kind of response you get — give them a chance to surprise you and act on the information.
Most police agencies and security companies offer CPTED audits for free or low cost to help an owner or property manager assess the weak points in their design and recommend improvements. If your initial attempts at encouraging your building to do a CPTED audit fail, consider reaching out to other cyclists and submit a formal group request in writing to your building management. Oftentimes the building management and the property developer are different folks and a CPTED audit may never have been done by either!
Finally, make sure that you do your part. A lot of “garage”-like bike theft is the result of tailgating — where the thief follows a resident into the building or bike cage — either on foot or following a car through the gate. While it can make for an uncomfortable situation, challenge any person following you in by foot, car or bike to swipe their fob, press their garage button or otherwise introduce themselves. If they belong there, they will appreciate you doing your part to help keep the building secure and you might inspire them to increase their efforts as well.
- Annie
