This blog nabs hire bike thief

A hire bike thief has been caught, TfL tell us, thanks to this blog.

Last Saturday we posted a picture of a hire bike we'd spotted suspiciously situated in a canalside garden in north London, with its logo painted out (right).


TfL's sleuths - the TfL-funded, 30-strong MPS Cycle Task Force - saw the blog and moved into action faster than you can say Bicycle Repair Man (right).

Within two hours, TfL's press person Silka tells us, they had swooped and made an arrest. A man has been cautioned on suspicion of theft. (Apparently, it was a display model rather than a street model, but had still been nicked.)

So if you see anything suspicious - such as a man riding a bicycle wearing a cape with his underpants on outside his trousers, or even a hire bike where it shouldn't be - help the fight against evil by reporting it to the hire bike website.

Games people play with hire bikes

On myLondonCycle they're encouraging you to play a Twitter-based game with the Hire Bikes.

Whenever you take one out, you tweet its number and use a particular hashtag. So by searching Twitter, you can then track the progress of individual bikes - er, or people. Check in whenever you use a hire bike, it urges you, so "everyone knows where you are cycling".

I'm not particularly a fan of surveillance. But maybe such surveillance could help explain how this hire bike got here. We spotted it in a back garden overlooking the Hertford Canal by Victoria Park the other day. There might be a perfectly reasonable explanation, though the amateurish way someone's spray-painted out the logo on the wheel trim raises suspicions.

Of course, there's disappointment for those using a stolen model. Many parts are non-standard and impossible to maintain without specialist equipment. (The valves, for instance, use special locks; you can't take a normal pump to them.)

More stolen wheels in the frame

We're all familiar with this sort of thing: a bike left with only the frame locked. Once the wheels are liberated, the owner can't be bothered to move an unwheeled piece of modern sculpture, and leaves it there to rot. This was on the rails at Vauxhall.


Such bike-skeleton public art seems to be getting more popular. This one's been round the corner from us for ages.


But this rack - somewhere in that little bit of Turkey between Kingsland Road and Stoke Newington - is just ridiculous: four frames and not a single wheel left, as if someone had started trying to model Paris's Pompidou Building. Hmm. The fact that it's outside a bike shop might have something to do with it...

What happens to all those wheels? Is someone assembling a vast artwork or rotating, copiously-spoked installation somewhere? Modern art is all about asking questions, I suppose.

Anti-theft advice for Lance

Lance Armstrong's got his bike back, reports Bike Radar. It was stolen three days ago from the back of a truck in Sacramento, California.

Good that it's been recovered, but how unfortunate that it was stolen in the first place. And a few simple precautions could have prevented all this.

First, expensive-looking bikes will get nicked. Many owners of such bikes in London daub the frame with blobs of paint; such distressing does seem to be a deterrent to the Brick Lane gang.

By displaying sponsors' names prominently, you see, you're telling the thief that you have a costly machine. Better to paint them out, or consider replacing them with downmarket brands (processed cheese, all-you-can-eat diners, pound / dollar stores, etc).

And Lance, always use two locks. Maybe in some areas you can get away with one; in London you need two sturdy Abuses. But don't just leave your bike unlocked in the back of a van, which is what was reported in this instance. There is a slight weight consideration, but it surely won't trouble someone as fit as you.

And was your bike registered with immobilise.com? I bet not.

Lance, you'd have been far better off with an inexpensive commuting bike - ideally one unattractive to thieves, with three hub gears and a basket at the front.

How long does a bike last?

It's a testament to modern engineering and marketing that you can buy a full-suspension bike from Halford's for eighty quid that will easily last you 20, 30, even 40 minutes or more.

Obviously a proper bike - one that costs you over say 250 quid and is made from metal, not tinfoil - will last rather longer. After all, you see plenty of Sunday club riders on a 20-year-old Dawes Super Galaxy.

Well, no. For me, at least.

As with beer, I don't buy bicycles, I only end up renting them. I compiled a list of all the bikes I'd ever had, and a clear pattern emerged: the maximum lifespan of a bike I own is about five years. Most don't even last that long before they get stolen, squashed by a lorry, or lost in the middle of 30,000 other bikes in a subterranean college shed.

Take, for example, my beloved Raleigh Record Ace (1996-2001), the bike I did the End to End, and London to Athens, on: turned into a folding bike by a truck while parked in Clink St.
Or the Specialized Hardrock (2001-2005): nicked while double-locked to a stand as I was having a curry in Twickenham. The curry wasn't even that good.

On that basis my current bike, a heavily customised Specialized Crossroads, with the accent on 'heavily', will expire sometime this year. I won't be too upset; it's something of a foster child. I was given it by an in-law who had bought it as a Christmas present for her boyfriend only for him to chuck her, so she gave it to me when my other bike was nicked.

The handlebars are so high that BP has dubbed it 'the Hyena' (below right). Thanks to the meercat stance it offers, when riding it I must be seven foot tall. I can look down on most car drivers, see what they're texting as they drive along, and let them know the error of their ways:

-'Scuse me, do you know what you're doing is wrong?
-What do you mean?
-I mean there's no apostrophe in it's.

I don't love this bike like I loved the other two. But it gets me around. It has a rack that can haul wheelbarrowfuls of shopping, and mudguards, and 27 gears, three of them in actual use. It has a twinky little bell unable to cut through a pedestrian's iPod, but handy for summoning a concierge. And when it goes to that great Brick Lane Market in the sky, I might just be a bit sad.

But then I'll have my excuse to buy a Thorn Sherpa. They really are built to last. I just hope that whoever steals it in 2014 will appreciate the fact.