Starting Points: Lance Armstrong

Aug 26, 2009

How Social Media Help People Find Stolen Bikes

By ANJALI ATHAVALEY

When Heather McKibbon's bike was stolen in May, she didn't just get angry. She decided to get it back.

The 29-year-old project manager at a Toronto consulting firm alerted people to the theft through the social-networking site Facebook. Just hours later, a friend replied with a link to a bike for sale that looked like her own $1,300 Cannondale touring bike on eBay's Kijiji, an online classified-ads site. Ms. McKibbon recognized her bike and, posing as an interested buyer, arranged to meet the seller at a local subway station. She brought the police along as well, resulting in a small-scale sting operation.

Police arrested the man and returned the Cannondale to Ms. McKibbon, who claimed it with photos of herself on the bike, as well as its serial number. "It was a little overwhelming to realize that nobody in Toronto gets their stolen bike back, and here I was about to get my stolen bike back," she says.

Ms. McKibbon is one of a growing number of bike-theft victims who are using bike blogs and social-media sites such as Twitter to take matters into their own hands. These grassroots efforts come as bike theft rises in cities and college campuses around the U.S.

San Diego saw a 45% increase in reported bike thefts in the first half of this year from a year earlier. The police station covering the central part of downtown Los Angeles has seen a 72% increase in stolen-bike reports so far this year, the city's police department says. Austin and Philadelphia have seen increases for the past two years. The incidence of theft is likely even higher, cycling advocates say, because many victims don't bother reporting bike thefts.

The reasons for the theft boom are complex, including population growth in some locales, but generally, more people are biking these days—and they are riding pricier bicycles. Also, the economic downturn is contributing to the increase.

"Harder times mean more thefts," says Bryan Hance, founder of StolenBicycleRegistry.com, where people can list their stolen bikes free. Last month, the site received 335 listings, about twice as many as a year ago. "Bikes are a lot more expensive than they were five or 10 years ago," he adds. "The fact that they are worth more makes them more of a target."

Jonathan Maus, publisher of BikePortland.org, an Oregon blog that relaunched its stolen-bikes listings in June, notes that "a lot of the growth in biking is coming from new people. They may not understand how important it is to use a real lock."

Some cities are taking action in an effort to be more bike-friendly. In Austin, city officials are planning to curb theft through a new bicycle registry and an education campaign on how to correctly lock a bike. Last month, Boston launched StolenBikesBoston.com, where people can register their bikes and send out theft alerts on Twitter and Facebook.

So far, about 240 people follow the alerts on Twitter and 350 on Facebook. Boston police don't track bike-theft numbers, but "we wanted to head off the theft issue because as ridership increases, theft increases," says Nicole Freedman, director of the city's bicycle program.

Cities are also trying to provide safer bike storage. New York's city council passed a law last month requiring commercial landlords to allow the employees of building tenants to bring their bikes into their buildings—potentially making it easier for cyclists to store their bikes at work. Advocates of the law say that fear of theft is the No. 1 reason people don't ride their bikes to work. Some city employers, like Google Inc. and Credit Suisse Group AG, already allow employees to store their bikes at work.

It isn't easy to park a bike in midtown Manhattan, says David Yassky, the city council member who introduced the bill. "A lot of people have put [a bike] in the street, and it has gotten stolen."

Many cyclists prefer to start their own grassroots movements against bike thieves. Senan Gorman, of Farmington, Conn., had his bike stolen a decade ago, but the pain is fresh. "It's still like it was yesterday," he says.

Two weeks ago, the 40-year-old flash developer launched an online community known as Karma Army for victims of sporting-equipment theft, focusing on bikes. Cyclists can send out Karma alerts about their stolen bikes to subscribers via RSS feed. He hopes to get police involved so that they, too, receive the theft alerts. The motto of the site, Mr. Gorman says, is simple: "It's bad karma if you steal someone else's stuff."

Mr. Gorman is also asking cyclists to record video messages telling bike thieves how they feel about having their prized possessions stolen and to upload the videos to YouTube. "Maybe there will be some [thieves] who will watch them," Mr. Gorman says.

The proliferation of sites puts more eyes on the road to identify thieves, says Mr. Maus of BikePortland.org. "We're trying to empower the eyes of the community to get bikes back," he says. The site had 80 listings for stolen bikes in July.

Even Lance Armstrong has tapped social media to cope with a theft. In February, the seven-time Tour de France winner used Twitter, which allows users to share content through short text messages, to tell fans about his stolen bike.

"Whoa!! They just came to my room and said our truck was broken into and someone stole my time trial bike!" he posted. "APB out to the twitterati." After the bike was returned to police in Sacramento, he gave his Twitter followers an update: "Oh!! And they recovered the bike!"

Cyclists who manage to locate their bikes online or on the streets should avoid confronting thieves themselves and should get local law enforcement involved, police say. "We can certainly set up a sting," says Lt. Paul Vernon, head of detectives for the Los Angeles Police Department's central division.

He notes that law-enforcement officials are seeing more "Frankenstein bikes," or those constructed from stolen parts, on the streets. "The trouble for many people is proving that [a recovered bike] is their bike." He recommends that cyclists record the serial numbers of their bikes or even etch their names into them for identification purposes.

Getting a stolen bike back may not mean your troubles are over. When James Selman's bike was stolen from his work studio in Portland in June, he posted an alert on BikePortland.org. A week and half later, Joe Wilson, a 27-year-old electrical engineering student, saw the bike, a Seven Cycles custom single-speed, outside his apartment and matched it to Mr. Selman's listing.

Mr. Wilson, who noted that the thief was wearing regular sneakers, rather than the special shoes that work best with the high-end pedals on the bike, emailed Mr. Selman to tell him that he was stalling the thief while calling the cops. The thief was arrested and the bike returned to its rightful owner.

Though Mr. Selman is grateful that the perpetrator was caught, he got the bike back with $850 worth of damage—an amount below his insurance deductible that he will have to pay out of pocket. His homeowners insurance would have covered the loss of the $5,500 bike. "The way the system works, I would have preferred for it to stay gone," he says.

Ms. McKibbon, who recovered her bike in Toronto, also faced new problems. Last weekend, her bike's rims, gears and other components were stolen on a busy street in Toronto.

But she has a message for bike thieves: Watch your back. "The world isn't as big as it once was," she says. "You never know who's watching."