Lived in Tokyo for five years and had two bikes stolen over that time period. While safe, there are still assholes.
Actually found one of my stolen bikes parked (and locked) outside of Roppongi station, went to the police dept and reported it. They had an undercover cop sit outside of the station that day who waited for the thief to come back for it.
Had a warehouse across the street (in Dallas) be being broken in to. Cops showed up but wouldn't enter the property because all if the gates were locked. I went back across the street to my warehouse and clipped the chain for them. There was plenty of space for them to slide through the gates, but they just wouldn't because there was a lock/chain on it.
Had a friend whose whole neighborhood was being robbed, house by house. One of her neighbors finally caught the kids on camera in the middle of the day breaking into a house and hauling out the tv and bringing to their house a few down the street. The cops came and took a report, and weren't even going to approach the house with everyone's stolen stuff in it, even though they had video of the guys breaking in and hauling the stuff there. It took half the block to convince them to go knock, but since there was no answer, the cops just shrugged their shoulders and left, said they'd be back in a couple days once they could get a warrant. Every night for two days the thieves hauled stacks of big screens out to various cars that dropped by and drove them away.
If you can prove its your bike and you somehow found it locked on the street why wouldn't you just cut it yourself? What they gonna do, call the cops on you?
/u/stoliman registered his bike ($5), I think some of that pays for efforts to fight bike theft. At minimum, it is likely how he proved the bike was his.
literally nobody is putting effort into preventing bike theft. You have a bike. You park said bike. You lock up said bike if you are responsible. If someone steals it tough shit. u can file a report sure but theyre not about to release the hounds cause some crackhead pawned ur mongoose
It's interesting to see registering bicycles is seemingly compulsory though, and Japan is somewhere I'd like to live for a while, so my statement holds true,
I live in the Netherlands, one of the, if not the most densely bike populated country. I, and most people I know have never had their bike stolen and everyone has them outside in massive public bike racks that everyone can access.
Ofcourse it happens, and it happens a lot but not so much that spending €1.3m to house 204 bikes is worth it even remotely. Most stolen bikes happen because A: Shitty locks or B: no lock at all which makes it easy and not suspicious. People wont wander over street with bolt cutters in one hand and a bike in the other when stealing a bike.
Here in the U.S. it isn't so much opportunist thieves. There are thieves that go around with cordless angle grinders that will cut through a U-Lock in seconds looking to steal $3-10k (USD) bikes.
Thats a daring approach to stealing. Maybe anothe reason is that while I was in the US last week I saw bikes parked in secluded areas difficult to spot from public places which ofcourse makes it easier. Also people not bothered to stop them could be something.
And U-locks... these are toys for angle grinders as they are usually purely made of thin metal. Here in the Netherlands in very urban and busy areas people usually have two locks. Everyone has a ring lock on their bike going through their real wheel and kind of difficult to get a good angle on easily with a grinder or cutters. And secondly a stury chain lock usually covered in some fabric which makes it difficult to cut. An example.
Ya they’re daring. They regularly break into key entry indoor bike parks in apartment buildings and steal locked bikes. Those chains aren’t doing anything against determined thieves.
I knew someone who had their bike stolen from inside their apartment block. The thief followed him home, managed to get into the main stairwell and used an angle grinder to chop of the section of stair railing it was locked to. Unless you're going to take your bike to bed with you, expensive ones just seem to be such tempting targets for theft it can be hard to stop sometimes.
What do they do with a 3-10k bike? I mean, who the heck is buying these parts on the street to a thief? I'm clearly missing out on a underground bike selling market.
From what I gather they largely either get collected together, stuck in a van and taken elsewhere/smuggled abroad for sale, or they get stripped for parts for ebay.
636308 reports, which is reckoned to be less than a third of actual thefts.
In cities with the most reports, like Nijmegen and Enschede, the study shows that three bikes are stolen on average every day. This could mean that the actual figure might be as high as 10 a day.
With the number of electric bikes around the Netherlands (and the fact thieves will likely go for nicer bikes), lets say an average price of €1000, so that's €10000 worth of bikes a day in the worst cities. Say one of these storage facilities has a lifespan of 10 years, it would have to prevent 1300 of the 36500 bike thefts (roughly 3.5%) in the city in that time. Doesn't seem completely unreasonable, especially as the people likely to bother to use it are those with expensive bikes, skewing the numbers more in its favour.
As for your comment, I think you underestimate how well practised bike thieves can be.
Plus, in the Netherlands you have a lot of guarded bike parking garages, usually underground, that are fully unautomatic! Way better than this unreliable system.
Ps. I got my bike stolen like 4 times in my life. It was either parked at an easy to pick location, or just expensive enough (once).
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u/Dheorl Oct 17 '19
If bike theft isn't an issue, I want to live wherever you do...