[mc808]

I wonder if there is more that bicycle manufacturers/dealers can do to prevent theft or help recover stolen bikes - not because they're obligated but just to improve sales. Especially as the price approaches four digits, "what if this gets stolen?" has to be near the top of most potential buyers' list of concerns and probably chills sales to some degree.

[tlrobinson]

Exploding bike seats? http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYlBT1d_GWo

Seriously though, GPS receivers and GSM radios are a few dollars each these days. Seems like an easy thing to hide in the frame (of course a thief could still part out everything except the frame)

[ptaipale]

Finding your bike is not helpful if the police is not interested. And they usually aren't where I live.

Except if you're yourself willing to enforce your retrieval with violence... at which point the police will be interested if everything does not go easily.

[LanceH]

I've heard of people meeting, trying "the fit" and just riding off.

[marincounty]

I bet you live in the Bay Area? Specifically, the east bay? Near Berkeley?

There's a two well known flea markets where bike thieves sell their stolen property. Even if you are at the flea market, with you bike's serial number in hand, the cops do not come out.

A huge guy, who had his bike stolen once too many times advertises in CL. He will literally show up at the flea market, and take your bike back, after you show him the serial number. (Guys like this do not get enough props. He does it because it's just the right thing to do.)

I have never used his services, but have had bikes stolen. I've literally given up. My bikes are now pretty much throwaway. If they are stolen, it's no big deal. I want to buy a motorcyle this summer, but theft is first feature on my mind.

Would I prosecute a bike thief? If I felt they were professionals--yes. If, I thought it was a yuppie, who gets a rush out of stealing--yes. If it was a homeless person--no.

I saw a great deterrent to bike theft at Target. Outside the store they had these little pods you put your bike in. You supply the lock. They take up too much room for most businesses though, but they look like you could stack them two units high?

[cpeterso]

Karin Cycle in Berkeley is a known fence for stolen bikes. The Yelp reviews are depressing, but clearly busting Karim Cycle is not economical for the Berkeley Police Department.

http://yelp.com/biz/karim-cycle-berkeley-3

[vostrocity]

You have to consider how difficult it is for the police to do anything in that circumstance – it's just 'he say, she say.' It might be easier if you've filed a police report and your bike is registered, but even then there is no evidence (especially on the spot) that the seller (who is probably just lingering around and not an actual registered flea market seller) stole the bike. I think part of it is also the culture: you don't want cops coming into a flea market to arrest people, because the whole flea market is a bit of a legal grey zone.

However, you should definitely press charges every time if you do get the police involved. That's the only way to reduce bike theft. If you don't press charges, the thief simply goes and steals another bike the next day.

[walrus01]

"A huge guy"...?

New service like uber: "rent a 350 pound Samoan"

VC money please!

[joncrocks]

Vigilant-me.

I'll take some equity for the name.

[ptaipale]

No, not Berkeley, not even the USA. This phenomenon is global.

[dpark]

The problem is then you need to remember to keep your bike's GPS tracker charged. Your bike isn't carrying a large capacity 12V battery the way your car is.

[tlrobinson]

For this purpose you could just have the cellular module wake up every x minutes to check to see if it should begin tracking.

Or use BLE and an accelerometer. If your phone isn't in range and the bike is moving then starting tracking.

I haven't done the math but you could probably get away with recharging every 6 months or so.

[dpark]

I have to be honest. I'm seriously doubting that math you didn't do. In my experience GPS murders small batteries. And putting large batteries on bikes seems like a nonstarter for bikes that aren't electric assist.

[mikepurvis]

But the GPS only needs to be active when the bike is a) moving, with b) the BLE phone connection absent. There are ultra low power motion sensor ICs that literally have a GPIO for "motion detected". Put that on the reset pin of your CC2541, and you'll be set for months of battery life.

[vostrocity]

Bluetooth LE and motion sensors are actually brilliant, but I think we're treating this too much as an individual problem when we can eliminate bike theft in the first place and not worry about installing trackers.

I've always thought about doing stings from the other direction: with bait bikes. For a bait bike, you just need a bike and a GPS tracker with a battery life of a week or so (a poorly-locked bike will be stolen in a matter of days). The GPS tracker is inserted in the seat tube, and if you glue/oxidize the seat in the seat tube, the thief can't remove the seat to check even if they are smart enough to check for a tracker. You can even add security cameras where you set up the bait bike (outside your apartment or home is a great place) to get additional information. The GPS tracker then gives you a location of either where the thief lives or where they store their stolen property, which lets you bust them pretty easily.

Even in a bicycle-friendly town with 100,000 in population (ala Berkeley), I can't imagine that there are more than a few hundred bike thieves. It would take only a dozen individuals doing bait bikes to bring down bike theft drastically. Combine that with "Bike Batman" style vigilantism identifying stolen bikes on the used market, and I think it's possible to reduce bike theft to near zero in a local area.

[Someone]

You don't care where your bike went, you care where it is, and you want a way to get that data remotely. The GPS only needs to be on when you call your bike, and that's where the problem lies: you have to find a way to decrease power usage of the GSM part.

Switching it on for a minute or so every hour if outside BLE range could help, but would make it harder to locate your bike fast. Maybe, it should start at a 100% duty cycle, and drop off over time? (Clock drift shouldn't be a problem. The device has GPS, so it has an accurate clock)

And you need to filter that 'motion detected' thing, or your bike will keep resetting itself, even before it can check the BLE connection. Or is that something that the sensor ICs can do for you, too, nowadays?

[dpark]

I am still doubtful but frankly neither informed nor interested enough to debate it further. Maybe BLE is more impressive than I've been assuming.

[anc84]

That sounds like a great Kickstarter project. ;)

[rorykoehler]

I thought about turning this into a hardware startup. GPS stickers for anything like bikes, guitars etc. Energy consumption was the big issue. Didn't pursue it further because of that.

[rorykoehler]

You could hook it up with a dyno that attaches to the bottom bracket with the gps sitting in the down tube. Cycling would charge it. Also checkout lock8.me . They made a smart lock instead which makes a lot of sense.

[justinator]

Here you go,

http://www.findmespot.com/en/index.php?cid=128

[JustSomeNobody]

I would only buy one that charged while I rode my bike.

[wildmusings]

I wonder if you could do the same thing a car does, charge the battery with the engine.

[dpark]

For electric-assist bikes, the GPS tracking could be worthwhile. For other bikes, the complexity of the system seems not worth it. It's probably more cost effective to just insure the bike and not have a small generator, battery, GPS, and wires all over.

For ultralight racing bikes, definitely not, but those are probably a minority even in cycling-friendly cities like Seattle.

[ptaipale]

Put the GPS tracker + battery in the headlight of a bike with hub dynamo... the tracker would work, you can activate it for just a few munutes a few times a day.

But if the police does not care, it is not useful.

[jdblair]

I've thought a lot about this. The problem with hiding the tracker in the frame is the GPS and GSM antenna will be blocked by the metal tube. There would have to be a way to get the antenna out (maybe a special bottle cage, with the antenna leads going through the lugs?). It would work for carbon fiber, though, and those are the most expensive bikes.

[Audiophilip]

>The problem with hiding the tracker in the frame is the GPS and GSM antenna will be blocked by the metal tube.

Not true, there are multiple battle-tested solutions out there, like these: www.spybike.com

[victorhooi]

I have one of their products.

It's not a bad product - but the company seems to have gone bust. They've stopped answering any emails, and the last news was that their Seat Post Tracker was meant to launch in 2012/2013:

http://www.bike-eu.com/sales-trends/nieuws/2012/8/spybike-se...

Their current trackers are 3G only - and most countries are shutting down (or have already shut down) their 3G GSM networks.

I'm definitely on the lookout for any replacements.

[ptaipale]

Their current trackers are 3G only - and most countries are shutting down (or have already shut down) their 3G GSM networks.

What? Some operators are closing 3G networks, but not, I think, "most countries". Frequency allocation is moved to LTE, yes.

But 3G modems fall back to 2G (GSM) which is'nt going away any time soon in most places (yes, there are exceptions), and 2G is quite enough to send location info.

[victorhooi]

Sorry, I meant 2G - e.g. in Australia, Telstra/Optus have already announced shut-down dates, the third network Vodafone hasn't, but they're expected to soon - which renders the device useless.

[walrus01]

Most good GPS receivers will get a signal through an ordinary low cost generic Chinese carbon fiber seatpost. Careful not to get the very cheap ones which are Alu wrapped in a CF laminate.

[7952]

You could also embed it in the steerer tub and have the antenna in a lockable headset cap.

[WalterBright]

Wouldn't a metal frame act as a Faraday cage and block all radio waves?

[lostlogin]

A cage needs to be earthed - the rubber tyres probably hinder this, however I'm not an electrical expert at any stretch.

[WalterBright]

> A cage needs to be earthed

No, it just has to be around the object. Try wrapping your cellphone in aluminum foil. It won't receive or send anymore.

[05]

There are commercially available trackers, e.g. http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Bicycle-gps-tracker-GPS-GSM-G...

[s_q_b]

One problem is that, even if you have your device GPS tracked, it can be hard to get the police to intervene, especially in large cities.

Someone once stole my iPhone 5. I had find my iPhone enabled, and the phone was locked down. The thief began texting me from his own phone, demanding ransoms ranging from $100-$1000 for the return of the phone, while aggressively threatening to throw my phone into the Potomac.

So I called the police.

I reported the theft, and the address of the thief's residence, and the fact that the phone was tracked by GPS. They transferred me to a Detective, who told me that they would file a stolen property report.

Throughout the week, I continued to receive increasingly erratic messages from the thief. The one consistent message was that if I didn't pay, he was insistent on throwing my phone into the river.

So I arranged to meet him at my bank at the Dupont Circle branch (a busy location with guards.) I would make out a check to cash for $200, he would give me my iPhone, and I would stick around until the check was cashed.

So when he arrived (we arranged to meet via picture exchange, so I had that as well as evidence), the thief approached me at the bank door. There was a police car immediately outside the bank, and I shouted to the officer "HELP!"

The man ran.

I went to the officer and said, "That man stole my phone!" Instantly, he jumped in his vehicle, told me to hop in the passenger seat, and we took off down P street. The officer stopped the car, sprinted after the thief, and he obeyed the cop's order to stop.

The man was taken to jail for theft and resisting arrest.

I said I didn't want to press charges as he was obviously severely disturbed. I asked if he could be given rehabilitation or treatment. They said they would place him on a 72-hour psychiatric hold.

As far as I know, that maybe only got him a shower, a few meals, and three days in a psych ward at GW Hospital, but I thought it better than anything else I could do.

I still wonder if I could have done something else to help the guy.

But the real moral of my story, is that even with a GPS beacon, it can be very very difficult to get the police to recover stolen property.

[pavel_lishin]

You're a good person, and you also shared an effective way of retrieving stolen property that I'd never thought about before.

[PKop]

Either the thief is prevented from committing further crimes, or more people will have their property stolen by him.

There is a cost to refusing to press charges, paid by his future victims.

[s_q_b]

You're assuming the thief is a rational actor.

I assure you, he was not.

[PKop]

I'm describing what will happen. Motives are irrelevant to the point I was making.

[pyre]

Based on this logic, he should have been killed rather than arrested. No future victims!

[pavel_lishin]

If we're going to play "absurd conclusions" game, my move is to declare that we should kill everyone. No future victims, ever!

[Chronic51]

He's a good person. Me and a million others would have pressed charges. Are we bad people?

[jerf]

A morality in which someone steals something from you, and then also incurs moral obligations on you to address their mental health issues, isn't really scalable. If you want to help him and go above and beyond, more power to you and my blessings upon you, but it is a bonus, not an obligation.

[s_q_b]

You speak of "their mental health issues", as if psychiatric disorders are a purely personal burden.

I would no more refuse to help a mentally ill person than I would refuse to perform CPR on a person having a heart attack.

They didn't choose to be this way.

[deepnet]

Answering your (perhaps rhetorical) question is hard without being there to see the actual guy.

Morality is situation specific, OP was there, perhaps if you were there you would have done the same.

There may have been other people whom most anyone would press charges apon.

Revenge is a dry & tasteless dish against some. Some deserve justice, some need only pity and help. Rehabilitation is logically better than punishment. One case is unlikely to alter overall deterrance. Thus each case should be judged on its merits.

Perhaps the guy's obvious disturbance was a ploy to fool the OP, luckily the cops could assit in this judgement with assesment.

This is the failure of Zero tolerance, when it produces obvious injustice. Equally this is the greatness of a judiciary who weight not only guilt but intent and circumstance.

The only bad or anti-social thing, is abrogating personal responsibility. Such as avoiding Jury Duty. Asimov's 1st law shows both an action or inaction that cause harm are equivalent.

[mc808]

Yes, I would look for something like that if I had an expensive city-bike. But the availability of trackers doesn't seem to have much effect on thefts or the perception that bikes are an easy target.

[victorhooi]

I use a Spybike (http://www.spybike.com/)

Unfortunately, the company seems to have gone bust.

They have stopped responding to emails - and their tracker is 3G only - many countries have started to shut down their 3G GSM trackers.

There was one on Kickstarter before called the "Bike Spike" - however, it turned out to be a fraud, and the creators ran away with backer's money (I didn't back them).

The Spybike isn't bad - the big issue is getting a GPS lock in urban areas, long GPS lock times from a cold-start, and battery life.

Definitely keen to see what else people are suggesting these days.

[victorhooi]

Correction - I meant to say 2G only (as in, their trackers only work on the 2G GSM network, which is being shutdown in many/most places).

[nmrm2]

> Especially as the price approaches four digits, "what if this gets stolen?" has to be near the top of most potential buyers' list of concerns and probably chills sales to some degree.

If you're spending that much on a bike then you're cycling regularly (communter and/or every weekend type). You're not going to ride a shitty bike if you're riding that often. Bikes aren't like cars -- a Corolla will get you from point A to point B just as well as a Cadillac, but a doubling in the price point of a bike (esp. 500 to 1000 range!) has a massive impact.

Of course there are people who buy racing bikes and ride them a few times a year. But those people rare enough that it doesn't make sense to spend the money designing and stocking a product just for them. And anyways, the guy on the sales floor is probably going to be the most important factor in their purchasing decision.

[galdosdi]

> You're not going to ride a shitty bike if you're riding that often.

Yes and no. If you ride that much, you won't be riding a shitty bike. However, it is NOT the case that if you ride that much, riding a "non-shitty" bike means you ride an expensive bike. Bike manufacturers would love for you to think that you need to pay a lot to get a decent bike, but it isn't true. You can easily spend $50 to $300, trick out the components for another $50 to $200, and have a _fantastic_ ride that can beat the pants off of most bikes out in the wild, including bikes that cost thousands. And, the more you ride and the longer you've been riding, the more likely doing this comes easily.

[nmrm2]

Sure.

But the people with the skill-set and interest in doing that are going to do so anyways; I don't see how anti-theft tech would convince that type of person to shell out an extra few hundred for a bike. They would just buy something and install it themselves.

I just don't see the market for integrated anti-theft. Seems more like a custom component type of thing.

[galdosdi]

I'd go further than that -- riding a cheap bike with a heavy U lock makes theft so rare in most places that it's not worth wasting any further time/money on the problem.

[vostrocity]

What? The bikes that get stolen in public are the bikes that get used regularly (usually daily).

[walrus01]

Really expensive bikes you just don't ever lock anywhere in public. I don't know anyone in Vancouver who would lock a $3500 road or mountain bike anywhere. You're either in possession of it or it's in your garage. There are B&E teams who break into garages in metro van looking for peoples' MTB collection, so this doesn't really solve the problem, but then you've got alarm systems, bars on windows, house insurance etc.

[justinator]

> Especially as the price approaches four digits, "what if this gets stolen?" has to be near the top of most potential buyers' list of concerns and probably chills sales to some degree.

Renter's insurance usually covers stolen bicycles.

[chrischen]

They could implement a system like iPhones (all iPhones register with Apple servers and lock up if reported stolen).

Mandatory serial numbers, and make it illegal to purchase or own a bike without a serial number, or to buy a stolen serial number.

[Symbiote]

Bikes already have serial numbers.

It's called a frame number, and is stamped into the metal, usually on the bottom bracket (where the pedals connect).

At least in the UK, there's a police register of stolen bikes using these numbers. It's also illegal to buy stolen property.

https://www.immobilise.com/

[lostlogin]

If you don't enter the correct passcode the derailed will jam, the tyres go flat, the brakes soft, peddles squeak and the handle bars will be 5 degrees off square. Basically you get my bike.

[qq66]

Illegal to own a bike without a serial number? That sounds like overkill.

[magni-]

That's what it's like here in Japan: http://www.tokyobybike.com/2013/11/how-to-register-your-bicy...

[chrischen]

Sounds like cars.

[fian]

Expensive carbon bike frames can't be stamped with serial number. I have had a few carbon frames, I think only one had a visible serial number on the outside...on a sticker. None of the bike shops could provide a serial number at time of purchase.

[walrus01]

The metal insert for bottom bracket (BB30 or not) can have an SN. this is permanently glued to the frame.