Locking a Bike

If you want to scare yourself sometime, dial up the FBI Web site I've just spent an hour negotiating. Search for the Uniform Crime Report and look for the numbers of bicycles reported stolen in the last year for which figures are complete ('97)—a whopping 430,000. Lord have mercy.

But it gets worse. Police departments and college-campus security divisions across the country estimate that relatively few bike thefts are actually reported. The reasons are many: the belief—unfortunately true—that most stolen bikes are never recovered; the notion that the police make only a halfhearted attempt to recover stolen bikes; the shame of having failed to lock the bike while you dashed into a store for "only a second," and others. But whatever the reasons, the result is an eye-popping estimate that the actual number of bikes stolen annually is between three and ten times greater than the already huge figure of reported thefts. Which translates to over 4 million bikes stolen each and every year. Or eight bikes a minute.

"Bikes are a commodity that has wheels. They're ready to roll," says Vytis Vardys, co-owner of Ozone Bike Department, a shop that buys and sells used bikes in Austin, Texas. The guy should know, for the lock manufacturer Kryptonite lists Austin as number eight in the top ten U.S. cities for bike theft.

And roll they do, not just from these big burgs but from small towns and campuses across the land (a 1994 study of bike theft on campuses nationwide showed that students stand a 53 percent chance—better than one in two!—of having their bikes stolen during a four-year stay). Bikes roll into and out of pawnshops and bike shops (though the latter are more often much better at spotting stolen goods). They are sold directly by thieves to individuals who are willing to overlook a crime to get a good deal (and who are little better than the slime who do the stealing. And stolen bikes also roll by the thousands into the greedy clutches of operators who buy bikes from rings of thieves who make their livings depriving you of something you love. Crime rates of almost all kinds have been going down. But not bike theft.

Okay, enough of this depressing information. I've provided it only to wake you up to the problem. Now is the time to choose between simply throwing up your hands at the magnitude of the situation and hoping for the best (and trusting your renter's or homeowner's insurance policy to buy you a replacement bike), or taking active steps toward holding onto your own property. If you choose the second, read on.