Bike theft is either the first or second most important deterrent to bicycling (the other being safety). People won’t buy a bike because they know it will get stolen. Or they know they won’t use it much because if they do it will get stolen. Or they do buy the bike, but they don’t use it much for fear of it getting stolen. Or they use it, and it gets stolen, and then they don’t bike anymore. Or maybe then they buy another cheaper bike and use it less because they enjoy riding it less. You might bike less because you have to carry around a heavy chain or lock, or you can’t park safely anywhere near where you want to go. For these and other reasons, fewer bikes are on the road, thus the road is less safe for bicyclists, and thus fewer people ride bikes. There are countless ways that the threat of bike theft decreases bike riding, and ending it should be a priority for those who wish to promote bicycling as a healthy, social, and environmentally friendly form of transport.
One can approach solving the problem from one of two ways. You can take steps to protect the bike from thieves, or you can take steps to remove the threat of thieves. Locks, valet parking, indoor parking parking seek to decrease the threat by making stealing more difficult. These are worthwhile, but I think there is a lot of unexplored potential in decreasing the threat of bicycle theft by pursuing and punishing thieves. The advantage of punishment is that it discourages more theft. A lock might deter the theft of a wheel and the frame, or valet parking might deter theft as long as the bike is in a valet facility, but prosecuting one bike theft is likely to deter many future thefts – by that thief as well as by others who are now alerted to the risk. Freakonomics noted how lojacks decreased theft of cars in this way, and the idea of adapting the concept to bicycles is worth pursuing.
I feel a little weird supporting entrapment, but in this case I am willing to endorse the principle. Assuming bicycle thieves are a very small group who are clued into what is safe to steal and what isn’t, we could mount a psychological war on them. Police could bait thieves in such a way that thieves wouldn’t know what areas were safe. I think this is essentially the strategy retail establishments take. It is generally very easy to shoplift, but stores pay enough attention that the threat of getting caught discourages most who are past that period of invulnerability known as adolescence.
I am not an expert in tackling crime, and I suspect that if it were a priority, the police would be able to come up with some more efficient ways to combat the trade. After all, there have to be secondary markets, these bikes must move between cities, and some storefronts must be complicit. The police no doubt have relationships in the community that they could leverage to suppress the market, if it were a priority. Instead, they currently focus on the hopeless task of combating drug traffic. The difference is notable: there can’t be much money in the trade of stolen bikes, so at least we are not fighting a strong economic impulse as we are in the “war on drugs.”
In addition to baiting bicycle thieves, we need to consider what punishments might look like if they aligned with the actual cost to society of bicycle theft. If you consider the increased fossil fuels consumed, health care expenditure because of increased obesity, the cost of decreased health that never gets a dollar form attached to it, the cost in terms of making our society less social, in terms of leaving a thinner glacier atop Greenland, and in terms of limiting the freedom of those who might wish to bike, the cost gets very high indeed. The damage that a random act of violence does to the walkability of a city street might be analogous. So if we approach the punishment from this perspective, we might come up with something very severe – jail, for years, I expect.
Another way to arrive at the right punishment is to estimate how much punishment would be necessary to curtail the practice. If thieves are making tens of thousands of dollars on the trade, jail for years, or a fine that would pauper the thief for years might be necessary to discourage it. If the thief stands to make a few hundred, this seems like a bit of overkill.
I am a big fan of fines as a first choice because this is more humane, is more effective in that the thief has all this time to explain to other potential thieves how he is still paying off a judgement, because it doesn’t add one inefficiency (the waist of a person’s labor) to another (the theft), because it doesn’t add to our already ridiculous prison population, because as crimes go this isn’t an anti-social crime – it is against property, not people -, and because it costs the state money to lock someone up, and we could pay someone to attend a bike valet parking spot for perhaps the same amount. I think a fine starting at $5,000 and capping out at $50,000 (because at too high a point there is just no possibility of being able to pay the fine back, and it will be ignored) would serve as an effective deterrent. Of course, fines only work as a punishment for people living generally within the parameters of society. If someone is off the map financially – they use check cashing places and have no hope of establishing credit, then this is of little use. Bringing these people into the mainstream should be a major goal of public policy – but that is a subject for another blog…
Finally, there is a phenomenon that skates closely to bike theft that needs to be addressed and allowed for when designing and enforcing punishments for bike theft. This I call bike liberation. If a bike is abandoned, a completely normal person with no anti-social qualities whatsoever may take it upon him or herself to break the lock and adopt the bike for him or herself. There is nothing wrong with this practice, although it can get a little iffy when you start talking about when a bike is clearly abandoned. I once watched a bike near my house that seemed abandoned for months and months and nothing happened. The tires stood deflated and trash slowly filled the handlebar basket and then poured over. It wasn’t a valuable bike, so thieves had little interest, and it wasn’t 100% clear that it was abandoned, so liberators were wary of making a move. Then someone took the seat. Over the next three weeks the bike was stripped, first of the front wheel, then the handlebars, then the brakes, and so on. Liberation can be a great thing, in that it brings cheap parts into use, clears our streets of liter, and frees up bike parking. As long as those practicing it are following a code of ethical behavior (as everyone seems to have in this example) it needs to be separated from theft in the eyes of the law, as (I think) it already is in the eyes of society.
Imagine a world without the threat of getting your bike stolen. It wouldn’t be immediately different world. People get into patterns of thought, and it would take a while for it to dawn on people that bicycling was a more viable form of transit. It would happen slowly, as pedestrian traffic returns slowly to a neighborhood after gang activity has been quashed. Just as realizing you no longer have to fear for your safety can completely change the character of a formerly violent neighborhood – bringing people out onto stoops to loiter, bring parents to parks with their children – no longer having the fear of theft would completely change the character of the city for those who might bicycle.
