"Bike thievery is essentially a risk-free crime"

Really interesting article on the economics of bike theft and attempts to answer the question "Why?".

http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/30393216796/what-happens-to-stolen-bicycles

good read, but sadly not much new and no solution suggested

Bikes are one of the four commodities of the street — cash, drugs, sex, and bikes… You can virtually exchange one for another.

How does one exchange sex for a bicycle? I've not seen the appropriate tag in the classifieds section.

Advertise for a "Pompino"

Googling that is NSFW, just in case you didn't know.

I'd be interested to see the bike crime rates for different places.

e.g. London/Cambridge/Oxford/Swindon/Amsterdam/Los Angeles/New York/Paris/etc.

Along with the total estimated number of bikes in those places and the population of them.

I wonder if bike crime prospers in places where cycling is on high, but has not yet reached the point of most people have a bike, and is lower in places where cycling takeup is very low, or where lots of people have bikes already.

An interesting read, that confirms a few things for me though.

Googling that is NSFW, just in case you didn't know.

oooh i see what you mean !
pompino is spanish for cucumber right ?

Pompino is Veronica Moser's own bike brand, trying not to cash in on her father's famous brand...

Risk-free.. unless (hopefully) someone d-locks you while you're doing it..

Or you don't like pooy paste on your hands.

... and is lower in places ... where lots of people have bikes already

I don't have the stats, but massively doubt this. Bike theft is high in cambridge and amsterdam. there used to be a story (in cambridge) that vans would come from out of town, drive round in the middle of the night, cutting locks and stealing bikes to take down to london or sell on elsewhere. a lot of people leave their bikes on the street over night and use flimsy locks.

That is what was stated in the article... that so long as a van from San Fran can be filled with 10 bikes, they can still turn a profit from driving up to LA.

That is what was stated in the article... that so long as a van from San Fran can be filled with 10 bikes, they can still turn a profit from driving up to LA.

Wow, all the way to Texas? Didn't realise he was quite such a scumbag/giving back all the prize money would bite that quickly ...

He was talking about Louisiana.