Lock it Up!
The other day I witnessed a crime…
The wheels had “quick-theft” levers and the whole transaction was done in 2 minutes. Which made me wonder how many bikes are lost to poor lock-up jobs just waiting for the wrong person with the right tool to come along…
And if that doesn’t happen, there could be another fate waiting…
But in addition to having a strong lock you need to actually lock it to something secure. However that has become much easier here in Somerville lately:
So there is no excuse for this!
A delivery truck backed over a foot onto the sidewalk and wrecked my bike just as i was walking to get it. Miserable experience.
Great post! I have to admit I am always nervous locking up my bike in public, especially in _certain_ neighborhoods.
Last month some idiot had inadvertently locked my bike as well as his own to a stand in the high street. It was only a weedy little wire cable lock; so I went and bought a £1.99 Chinese hacksaw and cut through it in about twenty seconds, leaving a polite note telling him/her to pay more attention next time. Though the street was full of passers-by, no one asked me what I was doing or even seemed to notice.
(NB: the other bicycle was a battered £70 Halfords-cheapo job, so if anyone thought it worth stealing I don’t suppose the financial loss was very great. I could have waited for the owner to come back I suppose: but I might still have been waiting at midnight or indeed for ever: the racks at the university where I work are full of abandoned bikes).
The ideal solution is a Dutch-style permanent ring lock on the rear wheel (amazingly difficult to cut since you can’t get at the shackle with bolt croppers or an electric grinder) plus a good chain lock to secure the bike to something solid. Seeing that, all but the most determined thieves will steal someone else’s instead.
In London of late one trick reportedly favoured by bike thieves has been to lock the bike they intend stealing with a chain of their own, hoping the owner will go off in search of assistance – or better still, home for the night – leaving them to remove the bike at their leisure.
That happened to my friend in Cambridge, MA, earlier this year. Someone slapped a Ulock on there, and I assumed it was a thief. We called the police, but they refused to cut the lock because she had no proof of ownership for the bike (it was an old bike). So we attempted to bust it ourselves, in broad daylight (and failed, proving that we would not make very good bike thieves). The interesting thing about the exercise is how, in the middle of busy Inman Sq, nobody said anything during the two hours we were out there trying various forms of leverage and force to break the lock. Finally, one group of students stopped and asked us rather hesitantly whether it was our bike. They said they only stopped and asked because of all the Youtube videos they had seen of people trying to steal bikes in broad daylight with nobody intervening.
THANK YOU for representing chopper/freak bike parking options! That totally made my day. Safe travels in your journeys!
The drawing of the bike going “Oww” reminded me of the time I lent my bike against a wall and it fell over and I said “sorry”! 🙂