A Dragnet for Pee-Wee

Looks like HN is cranky this morning.<p>I like it! A bike used to be my primary means of transportation back in the Bay Area, and I used to pay for good ones. Every single one of them got stolen. Every one. The last one I owned had a state-of-the-art lock on it, so the thieves <i>cut the bike rack</i>. People that don't rely on a bike seriously underestimate what it means to a bike owner when their bike is stolen; to a lot of people, it's just, "oh, you lost your toy, just go buy another one". To many bike owners, it's more like, "I just lost the ability to get around quickly."<p>The number one reason I don't own a bike right now is because I don't feel like putting up with it being stolen.<p>So this is one of those really big under-served pain points that everybody keeps saying you should look for when building a business.<p>priceonomics' approach makes perfect sense: make it easier to locate stolen bikes online, and build a new, centralized marketplace specifically for bikes that people will want to use (which also makes it harder for thieves to sell bikes online without the owner finding it).<p>Good job, guys.

I'm not sure it's fair to say that every bike sold on Craigslist is stolen, which is pretty much what their "stolen bike finder" tool suggests.<p>To then offer a classifieds tool seems a bit off... especially since there's nothing to say that stolen bikes are not being sold their either other than their word. But then, Craigslist would surely say that they don't support selling stolen goods either.<p>Mostly, as someone who runs one of the largest bike forums in the world, I'm unimpressed.<p>But as I don't like commenting negatively without at least thinking how I'd possibly do it better.<p>Provenance.<p>I would love to see something like <a href="http://velospace.org/node" rel="nofollow">http://velospace.org/node</a> that provides profiles of bikes, but with the capability of registering the components too.<p>Such that it becomes a database of bikes over time, you'd see what bits you changed when, etc.<p>If your bike gets stolen then you have a record that it was yours, and you mark it as stolen and it auto-alerts the police as well as auto-searching classifieds sites. And you'd have a record of anything you changed that helps identify it.<p>If you sell your bike, you assign the bike to the new owner, and the bike now shows who currently owns it as well as who used to own it... the bike gets provenance. A nice history of what it looked like when, and how owns it now.<p>With a bicycle provenance database you combine the best of buying a bike, owning a bike and selling a bike... whilst at the same time making it very easy for people to find the bike online if it gets stolen, and very easy to find it if it gets sold online. You have the ability to prove it was yours.<p>So what I'd like to see are sites like velospace expand into managing the provenance of bikes and for that to be used as a major deterrent to bike theft.

I'm impressed by your transition from the blog post to doing this site, and hopeful that a site like this one will finally take hold. Good luck!

I don't understand what they are actually doing to prevent the sale of stolen bikes through their site? I don't see anything on the bike listing or stolen bike search pages that would help with this.

One of the great frustrations of bike theft is that we know almost nothing about it. Auto insurers have an obvious incentive to research auto theft, which has led to numerous innovations in theft prevention. Things like locking wheel nuts, radio coding and immobilisers have hugely reduced automotive theft. With no such interested body in cycling, any efforts to reduce cycle theft are just guesswork.<p>We have absolutely no idea whether chains are better than D-locks. We don't know which kinds of bicycle are most likely to be stolen. We don't know what the most common methods of lock removal are. We don't know if any of the tracking products actually provide a deterrent or facilitate recovery. It's practically impossible to give good advice beyond the most basic aspects of using a good quality lock and parking in a busy area.<p>If anyone can think of a good approach to gathering this data then please let me know - I believe it's the biggest single solvable problem in cycling development.

Let's say a bike would normally last you ten years, but it gets stolen every two. Each time you buy a new one. Therefore, there are now five as many bikes as needed. But then, why isn't the market saturated? How can it sustain such a high churn rate? It seems to me that bike thieves need a way to get bikes out of the market, too. They can do it in two ways: by hoarding bikes (<a href="http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y171/FORDSVTPARTS/Bikes/bikes.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y171/FORDSVTPARTS/Bikes/bik...</a>) or by destroying them. Couldn't something be done about that side of the equation? Reporting people who have abnormal numbers of bikes, or who sell hundreds of old bikes for scraps?

Has anyone ever considered engineering a disable feature into bikes? What if there was, for example, a lock for the crank that would require too much work to defeat/break. The thief wouldn't steal the bike because his costs/time/difficulty would go up. Car stereo manufacturer's had this same issue a couple of decades ago. One brilliant solution was a removable faceplate for the the stereo. The owner just pulled that out (about the size of an iPhone 5) and took it with him/her when leaving the car. Another solution was to put a matching chip in the speakers...if the stereo was stolen and connected to an unmatched set of speakers, it wouldn't work. Let's get creative and end bike theft!

I've always thought that bicycles should have a standard ID number similar to how vehicles have a VIN (a BIN maybe?). This would go a long way in allowing victims to search for their bike in a registry, and also allow buyers to confirm the bike they're buying from some flea market wasn't nabbed the week prior somewhere. To me this would be the first step no-brainer to helping discourage this kind of theft.

I like the concept - a good addition would be to provide reporting and/or policing tools if you find a stolen bike (notify the local PD perhaps, or automatically send CL a takedown notice). It seems like Craigslist would be the first place you go if your (nicer) bike gets stolen, so as it stands, the Racklove search engine doesn't provide a lot of extra value.<p>As someone who works to provide better access to bikes via bike-sharing, I've seen that it's actually an incredible way to prevent bike theft. Sharing systems are over-engineered to the point where they're very difficult to mess with. However, deterrence for personal bike theft is an interesting problem. Despite the prevalence of bikes, nobody has found a method to secure or track them that's better than a standard U-lock. We're close to the point where GPS units could be installed on many bikes at reasonable cost, but it's still not easy. Something to work towards, or perhaps there's an easier solution out there.

I'd propose another feature: you can upload a picture of your stolen bike (make one now!) and crowd-source finding a match. Like others have said here: even if one person finds their bike on this service it's worth it. I've had bikes and bike parts stolen all over the world and I won't buy another one as I can't keep it indoors where I live at the moment. This service won't make me change my mind to buy another one but I might spend a few minutes a week comparing bike pictures as a good samaritan.

More private garages that accept bikes would go a long way towards mitigating the problem. They've just started appearing here in NYC (the muni garages are/were free, but maintenance and sanitation seemed like major issues) so I've started using them. I've been using Parkfast (<a href="http://www.parkfast.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.parkfast.com/</a>) for about 6 months and have been very happy with them. Your bike gets some protection from the elements too. $20/month

The major problem with trying to locate a stolen bike is that it's quite likely not being listed as a "1995 Schwinn YZ123", it's listed as "MANS BIKE L@@K".

Makes me think of this:<p>25. A Craigslist competitor. Craiglist is ambivalent about being a business. This is both a strength and a weakness. If you focus on the areas where it's a weakness, you may find there are better ways to solve some of the problems Craigslist solves.<p><a href="http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html" rel="nofollow">http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html</a>

It seems like a good way to legitimize a bike market place is to require listings to prominently feature bike serial numbers to search for their bike, thus reducing the revenue potential for flipping stolen bikes (and playing into the market theory in the linked article).

Really awesome, not sure how Racklove will prevent thives from selling stolen bikes... Maybe if it will be integrated more with FB, it will be less likely that thieves will use their real fb profile.

spoiler alert:<p><a href="https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&#38;noj=1&#38;site=webhp&#38;source=hp&#38;q=site%3Acraigslist.org+bianchi" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&#38;noj=1&#38;site=webhp...</a>

It sounds like Priceonomics is pivoting... into a bike classified site.

A rabbi visiting my house had an easier solution:<p>Every time he left his bike, he removed the seat and carried it with him. Annoying to steal a bike without a seat! Cost goes up!

Weird. The story with the YouTube video of the bike theft sting has apparently been taken down for violating the YouTube ToS.

This is yet another Craigslist scraper, no?<p>So it's vulnerable to the same issue that Padmapper, Carsabi, etc. have met...

A similar service for London <a href="http://bikeshd.co.uk" rel="nofollow">http://bikeshd.co.uk</a>

The city should place closed circuit cameras near bike racks and prosecute the thieves seriously.

Found my lost bike the the basement of the Alamo.