There's a market for stolen bikes, and there are enough people whose incentives are such that the rewards of stealing seem higher than the risks of getting caught and punished.
And one place that people land after they fall through the cracks of society is petty theft. In the US, we just have bigger cracks than many other wealthy developed countries. I don't like the theft anymore than anyone else, but I'd rather we not fix it by further criminalizing people through an even harsher police state than we already have, and becoming like even more authoritarian countries.
It's funny that we constantly ask this (very fair) question about common theft, but don't as often express such incredulity at the existence of extreme wealth. These two are connected in many ways.
It's just bikes. Mostly because they're valuable+standardized enough to be easily fenced, and yet not high-value enough for police to bother investigating. It's like leaving MacBooks sitting on street corners.
Bike chop shops that do that kind of volume do get prosecuted because it’s relatively easy to show that a place is selling a large volume of scrap metal from bikes.
It is much harder to prove that a thief is responsible for 1000 individual bike thefts, because you’d need evidence for each bike.
Proving bike theft is as easy as honeypotting any bike. Its just no prosecuted. It's a cultural blindspot for what I think are probably historical reasons.
You can steal a car priced lower than a bike and get a year in jail. ITs not about the cost of proving anything, it's about the willingness of the institution to enforce it.
first of all, yes, anything of value not bolted down is going to get stolen pretty fast in most american cities.
bikes are a particularly easy target. most people seem to use those U-locks that can only go through the frame and one wheel at most. the thief then pops off the other wheel and either pawns it or sells it for scrap. even if you secure the frame and both wheels, people will still strip the shifters and brakes off of it. people can also just cut the lock itself if they bring the appropriate equipment.
finally, nice bikes tend to really stick out. if you lock your $1000 schwinn alongside a bunch of shitty bikes, the thief will go for your bike every time.
- Bikes are an easy target given that most locks are easy to deal with and it’s the only mechanism preventing them from moving; cars are hard if not impossible to hotwire these days
- Bikes are high value but not extremely so, unlike a car, and most police forces do not take bike theft seriously
- Walking around with a stolen bike is a lot less conspicuous than walking around with, say, a stolen TV
There's already Velosurance. It's a good service if you've got a nice bike you're looking to cover.i But it's a heck of a lot cheaper to use a cheap bike as your townie, though, and accept that you might have to replace it every few years.
And it's amazing how strong a theft deterrent crap like stickers can be - it takes 5 seconds with a dremel for a bike thief to grind the serial numbers off a frame so it can't be traced, but the time it takes to scrub stickers off a frame to get it in resellable condition, divided by a cheap frame's resale value, easily works out to an even lower wage than driving for Uber.
Anecdotally, I make my bike up to look like bits are held on with duct tape (they aren't), and in 25 years I've never had a bike stolen. My theory is that thieves aren't looking close enough to figure out that it isn't actually a hoopty bike.
