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.
