Rohin Dhar writes:
While bike theft is an epidemic in major US cities, most people seem resigned that it’s just a fact of life. . . . at Priceonomics, we thought we’d take a crack at trying to reduce bike theft. Could we use software to help people fight back against bike thieves?
Professional bike thieves exist because they can make a profit. Luckily, this author went to business school and remembers exactly one equation from the experience:
Profit = Revenue – Cost
From a criminal’s perspective, the “Cost” of bike theft is about zero. The odds of getting caught are negligible and the penalty is about zero as well. Most commentators suggest that in order to prevent bike theft, the government should increase the penalties to make it a less attractive crime. As we stated earlier, we somehow doubt government intervention is going to happen any time soon.
We decided to focus on the revenue half of the equation. Could we make it harder for bike thieves to turn their contraband into cash? If you make it nearly impossible to sell a stolen bike, fewer bikes should get stolen because it’s more difficult to turn a profit. . . .
So that’s what we decided to build. A tool to help you track down your bike when it gets stolen and make it really hard for criminals to flip it for a profit by selling it online. A dragnet for stolen bikes.
What we’ve built is a search engine of almost every bike for sale on the web. If someone out there is trying to sell your stolen bike, you can catch them here:
If your bike is stolen in San Francisco and the thief is selling it in Los Angeles, now you have a way to find it. If they’ve stripped the bike down to its frame and are trying to auction it off, you can find it too. You can search on the site or set an alert and we’ll notify when bikes matching the description pop up. . . .
As people who love bicycles, we’re not very pleased with Craigslist and eBay. Bikes get stolen and then flipped for a profit on marketplaces like these. The whole reason bikes get stolen is because reselling them online is so easy to do.
So, we created an alternative marketplace for people that just want a nice place to buy and sell bikes. If the current marketplaces are cesspools of stolen bikes, then it would be nice if there were at least an alternative. A place where the community could prevent stolen bikes from being sold and just generally be excellent to each other. Here it is:
The harder you make it to profit from bike theft, the less prevalent this crime will be become.
So you find your stolen bike in Alaska.
What, you send the guy and email and ask for it back?
Or you contact police to contact ISP to get an injunction to get the guy’s real name and address, and then start legal proceedings…
Or maybe you hire a hitman. Might be cheaper, faster, more effective, and a great deterrent (assuming no moral hazard by hitman). How about:
http://www.bikehitman.com “With our network of bike hitmen across the country we guarantee your bike back, or else we break their knee caps. And all for the modest sum of $50 plus shipping.”.
Sometimes you wish for Don Corleone.
Costly:
See the title of this post. The goal of that project is not to allow all bikes to be recovered; it’s to increase the cost of bike theft. If, to avoid recovery, the thief has to take the stolen bike to Alaska, we’ve already won, in the sense that this cost would be a huge deterrent to stealing the bike in the first place.
I’m fairly sure that this violates the Craigslist TOS, unless they have a agreement with Craigslist.
Quote:
“Any copying, aggregation, display, distribution, performance or derivative use of craigslist or any content posted on craigslist whether done directly or through intermediaries (including but not limited to by means of spiders, robots, crawlers, scrapers, framing, iframes or RSS feeds) is prohibited”
On racklove, top left, it says “Bike get stolen?”. Is that something Americans say? Not “Bike got stolen?”?
Implied is “did your bike get stolen”? If it were not a question then “your bike got stolen” would be required. “Your bike got stolen?” would also be correct though.
Economics works both ways.
The article deals with the criminal side. On the owner side, there is an obvious tradeoff between the value of the bike and the amount of effort spent securing it. All examples in the article and through its links refer to crappy low-end bikes, to irresponsible owners (e.g. a 12-year-old), or both at the same time (such as “bike two” in the Outside article, “heavy and scarred” and left by the owner “poorly locked, behind his apartment building.”)
Responsible owners of expensive bikes don’t leave their bikes outside their apartment buildings overnight. When the value of the bike gets into the four digits, owners tend to start taking serious protective measures (e.g. taking the bike into the hotel room when staying in a hotel overnight.)
While it is true that owners of expensive bikes go to great lengths to keep them from being stolen, oftentimes that just isn’t enough. Here in Philly (and I can only assume elsewhere as well), theives will break into houses just to steal bikes, steal well-secured bikes on well-traveled streets in broad daylight (no clue how, but it’s happened), or steal entire bike racks so they can cut the locks later. I think the search engine is a great idea in theory, if not in practice.
Also, bravo to everyone (myself included) for using anecdotal evidence on a statistics blog!
Stealing well-secured bikes on well-traveled streets in broad daylight in NYC is disturbingly easy (though n is low in this study):
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/13/opinion/bike-thief.html?_r=1
Leaving a bike “well-secured” or locked to a bike rack in the street makes about as much sense to me as, say, a woman leaving her handbag locked to the same bike rack in front of the building because she can’t be bothered to carry it inside. If you come back later, your handbag might be there but the stuff inside sure won’t be.
On a new high-end road bike, just the saddle might retail for $100 to $200, and it takes a set of allen wrenches and 5 seconds of time to take it off.
Of course, when we’re talking about thieves breaking into houses to get bikes, that’s a whole new ballgame, it’s the difference between petty bike theft (as described in articles, seen by cops as not-a-crime and, worst case scenario, punishable by probation), and residential burglary (here in California, a felony and two to six years in prison, regardless of the value taken.)
It would be interesting if someone could use data to measure the causal effect of Ebay or Craigslist on bike thefts. Maybe by looking at the dates when Craigslist added individual cities to its database and comparing it to reported bike thefts (and sales of bike locks)? Maybe somebody has done this already?
There are several other websites that have similar services (see http://www.leadsonline.com/main/index.php or http://www.immobilise.com/about.html or http://www.tracechecker.com/ for just some examples). I think they are good ideas but I’m skeptical of how fruitful they are. Part of the problem is not only buy in, but people carrying enough information to distinguish between different bikes (people rarely have serial numbers nor images of the bike, sometimes people don’t even know the brand). It would be nice if the FBI made a one stop shop for all property thefts (and maybe even image recognition!) instead of having fractured communities in so many separate sites.
Currently there are various local laws (and perhaps a state law?) in New York that makes pawn shop owners record information on individuals who sell items. They send the list over to the PD on a regular basis, and if we have serial numbers we can cross check missing items or if known serial thieves are in the registrar we can see if recent thefts match the items pawned. Can’t say how effective it is in the grand scheme of things, but I guess any little bit helps though (or at least the time on our end to check the pawn list is minimal enough that even helping a case say only once a month is perhaps worth the effort).