Stolen Bikes in Edmonton

Here’s a bike thief, driving a red Honda with plate EJR-591, caught trying to steal a bike in Chinatown.

http://www.pinkbike.com/forum/listcomments/?threadid=80952&pagenum=1

http://www.flickr.com/photos/electrigrapher/3692207210

Had my locked blue Brodie Tempyst bicycle stolen from my fenced backyard sometime between 8am and 430pm thursday June 18th. I live just off Whyte ave (101 street and 80th ave). Serial number U6yk04865.

During the Bikeology discussion salon on touring (and dancing) on Tuesday, June 16, EBC’s 6-foot bicycle cargo trailer and our volunteer coordinator’s bicycle were both stolen.

If you spot either the bike or the trailer (likely both together), please contact the police at 780-423-4567. We’d appreciate it if you e-mailed us, too: info@edmontonbikes.ca

They were taken in the evening, near 102 St on Jasper Ave. The bicycle is a black Norco Katmandu mountain bike with a grey seat, front fender and slicker tires. (Kind of like the bike pictured below, but not exactly.)

The trailer looks like this, with the addition of red and white retroreflective stickers all over, and red donut lights on the four corners. The hitch arm has a sticker that reads, “Bikes At Work”. The rear tube of the trailer probably has some sassy sticker like “This is my SUV”.

To my knowledge, we’re the only ones in the city with this style of trailer (our President has a different model that looks more like a ladder on wheels). We have a second, identical 6’ trailer, but if you spot anyone riding around with the trailer, they should know that EBC owns it and that Lauren is our volunteer coordinator.

This is a blog where Edmonton commuters can post photos and information about their stolen bicycles, in hopes of recovering them. We hope you’re not here to post about your stolen bike, but if you are, you can register/login on the right to create a posting, and we’ll publish your post once we’ve reviewed it.

Your best option, certainly, is to avoid having your bike stolen in the first place. A well-locked bicycle won’t get stolen, unless it also happens to be a $10,000 bicycle and gets left in the open for a long time. (Most $10,000 bicycles, by the by, are never well-locked. The owners are just surgically attached to them.) Bike thieves are usually opportunists, and will go after the easy-steal: the bicycle in your unlocked shed, the bicycle with the cheap cable lock, or the bike that’s locked to a dead twig. Or the unlocked quick-release wheels.

Your local bike shop may recommend spending about 10% of your bike’s value on locks. Here at EBC, it ends up being 50-100% of your bike’s value for the same lock, which pretty much guarantees that bike thieves will go after something more worth their effort. (I once walked into a bike shop asking for their cheapest lock, and they gave me the “10%” number, so I jokingly asked for a 10-cent lock.)

You can buy a low/mid-quality U-lock for $15. Don’t waste your money on a $20 cable lock–it’s not much better than a $1 cable lock, and a $40 U-lock will keep your bike much safer than a $40 cable lock. Don’t waste your money on a standard padlock, either: as thick as your chain may be, your padlock is the weakest link, and it’s probably easy to break. Use a mini-U-lock and heavy-duty chain, if you want to use a chain.