If my landlord asks me how many bicycles I have, I
have one (1). If you ask me how many bicycles I have, I have “one” (X). (My
landlord only allows one bicycle per resident in our bicycle storage house. My
landlord seems to have completely missed the fact that the world is in the
middle of a paradigm shift. Since the 1950’s the car has, in the Western world
at least, been seen as the norm, the dominant means of transportation. Freedom,
to be able to go anywhere you want anytime you want, power, to drive a strong,
fast car, status, to own an expensive, cool car. The car has been seen not as a
way to get to where you need or want to go, but as the way to get to where you
need or want to go. But that is beginning to change. More and more people
choose to ride their bicycles instead, to school, to work or to do errands. Both
for economic and ecological reasons. Or they ride for fun and exercise! A lot
of people ride road bicycles and mountain bikes in their free time. And
honestly, how many people drive Formula 1 or rally cars in their free time? In
the countryside and in the forest? I suppose I know some people who only own
one bike – maybe you’re one of them – but I couldn’t tell who. And I suppose
that my landlord only owns one bike. And it’s probably an electric bicycle too!
Or maybe my landlord doesn’t own a single one. However, today a lot of people
who can, do indeed own several bike. Including me.)
I keep my expensive bicycles (my road bicycle and my mountain bike) in the apartment, because I simply wouldn’t be able to sleep at night if I kept them in the bicycle storage house. The bicycle storage house is… OK, I guess. It is situated between the short sides of two apartment houses, but the people who use it, my neighbors, tend to use the automatic door opener quite recklessly, i e just pushing the button and ride away without actually watching the door close and lock. And bikes have been stolen from the building. The bicycle storage house had only stood there for a week, with bicycles in it, when my son’s bike was stolen. They had tried to steal my bike too, my frame lock looked like the victim of a hate crime, it was demolished, but the bicycle thieves had missed the fact that it was actually a very good bicycle lock.
On a side note I got my son’s bike back a couple of weeks later. My son began to cry when I told him that his bike had been stolen, and I had put quite some time and effort into that bicycle. It was a bicycle that we had found just standing behind our house, I took it to the Police lost property office, handed it in, it stood there for three months but whoever owned it obviously wasn’t very interested in having it back so three months later it was ours. It was a mountain bike-ish commuter bike, which I turned into a road bicycle-ish commuter bike. It turned out pretty good, actually! So I was furious when it was stolen, I would have been damned to let a thief get away with it. And so I started scouring web sites where bicycles are sold. Eventually I found it, on Facebook Market (Fences’ paradise). I contacted the police, told them everything but they wouldn’t do anything (unless I could get the thief to take a photo of the frame identification number… like that would happen), so I instead contacted the person selling it, said that I wanted to buy it and set up to meet her. The woman selling it was posing with pitbulls on her Facebook page, so I was nervous to say the least! Would she bring her dogs? What would she do? Would things turn violent? I couldn’t get the police to come to the meeting either, but I came to the place where we had agreed to meet. A woman who immediately rode away to the side and a man riding my son’s bike arrived. It turned out that the woman selling the bike was the thief’s mother and the man riding my son’s bike was her boyfriend. I immediately turned the bike upside down, even if I knew it was my son’s (it was quite heavily customized), the man said “It’s stolen, isn’t it?” and when I told him what had happened he just let me have the it back. He was actually really sympathetic and likable. The day after the police called and asked how the meeting had went… Well, we were lucky.
So even if the bike I keep in the bicycle storage house is my least expensive one and, to be honest, kind of beat up now and so not very attractive to thieves, I want to keep it. I lock all my one bike with a minimum of three locks. A heavy D-lock through the frame, a wire lock or a heavy chain also through the frame and then another heavy D-lock connecting the wire or chain to the bicycle stand. Is it completely safe? No. It’s not. There are very few locks that can’t eventually be cut with an angle grinder, and I have never seen Lock Picking Lawyer (just search Youtube) not being able to pick and eventually open a lock. And this is pretty important to remember: There are no bicycle locks that are completely unbreakable and unpickable. (If you do know of an unbreakable and unpickable bicycle lock, please let me know!) The best you can hope for is that your bike is so well locked up that a bicycle thief will not think that it’s worth the effort and/or steal another one. There are a few things that you could do, though, so here are my tips:
1. If I know that I will leave my bike unattended I never lock my bikes with fewer than two locks. Even if I took the bike to a shop and just pop in for a minute or two I lock my bike with two locks that I have carried in my backpack. Why? Well, I would feel really stupid if I came out of the shop, with the locks in the backpack, and my bike was gone. If I leave my bike overnight or in a special place I use a minimum of three locks. And by “special place” I mean in a place where I know that bikes get stolen and/or where a bike thief could work pretty undisturbed with breaking or picking my locks.
2. I use different
locks. This is both to deter bike thieves and to make it easier for me. Heavy
D-locks (also known as U-locks), like this one
are, according to my experience, the safest ones. So two D-locks, at least one of them through the frame, and a wire lock or a chain, preferably somehow wrapped around something immobile, like a bike stand, a street light or a traffic sign, and either connected to the frame or one of the D-locks. It’s also a good idea to wrap the wire lock or chain through the front wheel, to make that less easy to steal. If you can lock up the back wheel, through the frame, even better! If you have a dropper seatpost, push it all the way down and draw a wire lock through the saddle rails as well. This also applies if you have a quick release seatclamp.
The reason I use different locks is both to deter thieves and for my own sake. If one of the locks I use should somehow be a thief’s “favorite” because he or she (the thief) has found a way to break or pick them it’s a good idea to use other kinds too. And it makes it very much easier for me, when I am to lock or unlock the bike, because I know which key goes with which lock.
3. Consider your weakest link. If you have, say, two ultra-safe D-locks, like this one
(I have that lock and it’s very safe but heavy as a mother)
and a wire lock or a chain, like this one
(I have that lock too, and it’s very safe but heavy as a mother too)
, you lock your bike through the frame and both the wheels, but you lock it to, say, a thin bike rack or a wooden fence... If you have a valuable bike and you lock it either to nothing or to something that is easily broken the thief might take the whole bike with them, away, and start breaking and/or picking the locks in peace and quiet someplace else. I have seen bike thieves do just that.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWvM_ND9CI4]
This is a perfect example of really crappy bike racks. You can just unscrew them and take them down.
4. A way to further deter bike thieves is to uglify or (heavily) modify your bicycle. A guy I met once said that he was going to write or paint “The person who tries to sell you this bike is a thief and a f**king asshole” on his bicycle. It’s a good idea as long as you don’t try to sell the bike yourself… But painting your bike with very vivid colors and/or bright patterns makes the bike harder to sell to someone just looking for a bike to ride to work on. People who… No, actually: Assholes who would consider buying a stolen bike seem to prefer discreet, generic bicycles. Black is a preferred color. So paint your bike orange, with purple dots all over it, and paint your name all over it while you’re at it. Or better yet: Give a couple of kids lots of paint and give them complete freedom to paint your bike.
This would be a better world if people never bought stolen bikes. (My guess is that very few bikes are stolen because the thief got an irresistible urge to go for a mountain bike ride in the middle of the night.) I was somewhat amazed to see people just leaving their bicycles, unlocked, outside shops in Taiwan. It must be great to be able to do that.
Have any tips of your own? Feel free to tell me!
Ride safe!
