Best is safe. At Velorution we recommend investing in quality bicycles. They are more comfortable, more reliable, more durable and more stylish than £200 “hybrids”.
The risk of theft is a common concern for new customers. They are understandably worried about investing £400 plus on a vehicle only to have it liberated by a kid with a pair of bolt croppers.
Recent research conducted in Westminster over a period of a year and documented by Keiran Proffer, Neighbourhood Watch Co-ordinator, may help put minds at rest: a cycle worth less than £100 is far more likely to be stolen than any other; of course there are more cheap bikes than expensive ones, but the latter are not more targetted by villains. To understand why this is so, one must look at the misdeed from the point of view of the thief.
There are three main categories of thieves: the drug addict, the young hooligan and the professional. The first two will roam the streets and strike when they see something easy to take and, most importantly, easy to sell. An expensive-looking bike represents a more difficult sale: if they try to sell at a high price, it may take too long; if they sell it too cheap, they will raise suspicion. So the best target is a standard bike that they can sell for £50.
The professional thief, who generally goes around with bolt-cutter and a van, has done more homework: he has a outlets for his loot, often in different towns and through online auction sites. But the principle is the same: he makes money from high turnover, not from high prices. An example in case is the theft of Bromptons. For many years, Bromptons were left alone. Then a market in stolen Brompton developed, partly at Brick Lane and partly on line. Suddenly hundreds of Brompton started to disappear. This happened not because thieves realised that Bromptons are expensive, but because they learned they were easy to sell.
Many people camouflage their expensive bike to make it look like a cheap one, “not worth stealing”.Wrong!!! It may be paradoxical, but the best way to ensure that thieves pass on your bike is to make it look exclusive and expensive.
Cycle messengers have another anti-theft strategy: riding a “fixie”: when they have an urgent pick-up to make they might leave their bike unlocked outside, confident that a druggie would not manage more than 100metres before falling face flat on the tarmac. Similarly, I often leave my Pedersen unlocked if I have to nip in a shop: yobs are afraid to get on it and possibly make fools of themselves.
Of course the above strategies are not 100% proof; it is always advisable to tag one’s bike and register it with Immobilise, so that if your stolen bike falls from the sky into a policeman’s lap, he or she might call you. That is also why we are working hard to introduce a bicycle tracking device, that will sober up many druggies, yobs and chiselers.
any intersting theory…
I agree… to some extent
cyclist do not still bikes
thieves steal bikes
so frequently quality is not known to the thief
it is hard to sell something that is dirty and broken down
shine aids to the effort of resale
years ago when the ceiling of the price of a bike was much lower and mid range was not so extreme
I had several bikes
a low end Mongoose with a shiney chrome frame
and a chipped up Cannondale SM600 (I think) with dark gray paint and a 24 inch rear wheel
I would see the eyes of the crackhead watch me roll by on the chrome machine
while I went by stealth on the more expensive but seemingly less desireable canyonsnail
or so it seemed
yes
resale
each bike goes for the same price
25-50 bucks or whatever a “rock” costs in this current market
does not matter what the bike is
they just need to move their product to get their fix
It would be interesting to see the data that this idea is based on. One thing I wonder about especially is whether the cheap bike was locked up as carefully as the expensive one and whether or not the cheap bikes were in higher-crime locations.
Velosopher,
The data was collected by Keiran Proffer, the Neighbourhood Watch Co-ordinator; and presented to the Westminster Cycling Campaign.
These are some details of the findings:
Of course the numbers reflect the distribution of bicycles, riders and thieves. However, it is noteworthy that expensive bikes are not targetted by thieves.
We have a service to borrow bicycles to Erasmus Students in Valladolid, Spain. We accept donations from people who give us their unused old bicycles. The mayority of bicycles we receive are those tour de France ones (very old ones) because they are not accepted even in second hand shops: nobody wants to buy one. If those bicycle are not accepted by resellers, it is easy to conclude that they are not to be stollen. In all the cases, interesting silogisme and nice logo Andrea.
Here in a college town in the USA, I don’t lock my Radius C4 recumbent when I go into shops, since, with its under-the-seat steering, it can’t be ridden away by a thieves who haven’t ever practiced (even my more experienced friends can’t just get on and ride it without danger of falling over). It’s also too heavy to be lifted or carried very far by one person.
I almost always lock my upright bike, since, though not that fancy a bike, it’s got a Schmidt dynamo in the front wheel.
Andrea
What’s a fixie exactly?
A fixie is a single speed bike where the sprocket is fixed to the hub; in other words the back wheel is not free to move unless the pedals move.
Hi,
I visited your velorution.biz website and liked it very much.
Great looking child seat – I wish I had had one like that.
I wonder if you would consider exchanging reciprocal themed links with my Cycling directory?
To help my visitors find similar sites, I organise my links under a number of themed pages. Your listing would be in the Child Seats and Cycle Shops theme on this page:
http://cycle.hopcott.net/links/childseats.html
http://cycle.hopcott.net/links/cycleshops.html
. However, I would welcome alternative suggestions.
Thanks for your time in reading this. I really do hope to hear from you.
Bye for now.
Rob Hopcott
rob@hopcott.com
http://hopcott.com
http://www.hopcottebooks.com/
and others
If you would like to to add my web site”s link to your web site:
http://cycle.hopcott.net/mylinkinfo.html
I only ever bothered with house insurance once, the year that I invested £400 of my hard-earned in a brand new TREK 930 (I know, I know, but I was young and naive then and didn’t realise they were an evil corporate giant). I lived in London ant the time and worked in Westminster. I left the bike locked up for 30 mins one time near Trafalgar Square and sure enough it was stolen. I replaced it with a battered, second-hand Claud Butler which lasted me a good few years before I finally scrapped it.
I don’t buy your theory, as what’s to stop a thief selling ANY bike for £50, regardless of the quality? There are plenty of unscrupulous people out there who would buy a dodgy Cannondale for that amount. If there wasn’t a market for stiolen bikes, there would be no thieves.
What I will concede is that in our brand-obsessed culture thieves are attracted to logos. The more flashy logos on your bike the more attractive it will be to them. Top-end bikes generally sport fewer logos, as the quality of the components is assured by the price, I guess, therfore making them less attractive to thieves. My advice is to remove all decals, branding etc from your bike wherever possible.
I lived for a year in Paris, taking my Dean Colonel with me. I completely debadged everything on my bike, and I never once had any trouble – even leaving it locked up on the rue de rivoli overnight on one occassion. Had I left my flashy Dean logos on my bike, I am sure it would have attracted a lot of unwanted attention. For touring and for cities, you want your bike to blend in as much as possible. To reccommend people make their bike as flashy as possible is completely foolish and, could only be made by someone who has little clue about city life.
Matt,
I ride in one of the largest cities in the world with very high cycle theft statistics. I ride a Pedersen, a £1200 bicycle and I feel comfortable locking it outside (with a good lock); much more comfortable than leaving a non-labeled bike with middle of the range lock.
Let’s be honest, your bike is not a ‘normal’ bike, making it a lot easier to trace and requiring something of an an acquired taste. Riding a bike like yours and preaching to ‘normal’ bike users is hardly comparing on a like for like basis. For one, if I were a bike thief, I wouldn’t wish to be seen dead on a Pedersen
[...] first hit on Google was a blog post advising me that expensive bikes are less likely to be stolen than cheaper ones. Not much [...]
Expensive bikes could be the solution, but I would also vote for a more restrictive law. That way people caught stealing could face certain penalties.
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