Spokespeak: York's bike registration scheme

Operation Spoke is York's bike registration scheme.

Local police have their eye on several dodgy lockup-garage dealers in the area - the sort of people who advertise lots of bikes of hazy provenance on Gumtree or eBay.

(One of the suspected fences, apparently, is a teacher. If you're offered a bike that seems too cheap to be true in York by a man with patches on his elbows and red pens in his top pocket, beware.)

But it's hard to prove a bike has been nicked - which is where this database comes in.

We stumbled across a Spoke Registration Event on Sunday (top right), ambling round a deserted York College.


No elaborate bike surgery involving transponders inserted into down tubes here. All that happens is a bloke writes a code number in various places on your bike with a special pen (right).

The writing only shows up under UV light, if you take your bike into a disco for instance, or a public toilet in Hull.

Well, he said it was a code number he was writing. It could have been Ha Ha Big Nose. Probably best to be nice to registration teams, just in case.


There's a national self-registration scheme at immobilise.com, but Spoke sessions are worth dropping in on, partly for peace of mind, but also because you get lots of free yellow things (right): keyrings, spoke reflectors, trouser bands.

There may be something predictable about our young cycling nephews' cracker fillings next weekend...

Spot the unregistered bike: Anti-theft paint jobs

Cycle theft in York is down, according to a meeting on the subject I went to this week. (Amusingly, there wasn't proper cycle parking, just a bit of chain.)

But one of the biggest problems the police face is that of unmarked bikes. There are several dodgy, lockup-garage bike dealers they have their eye on, who flog machines of dubious provenance through Gumtree and eBay using only mobile phone numbers.


When they turn up at said lockup making polite enquiries, however, none of the bikes there register on any database, so there's no proof they've been half-inched.

The local register in York is called Operation Spoke - there are regular free registration sessions - and this automatically puts you onto the national Immobilise database.

Hmm; it's no guarantee, as I know from having my Immobilise-registered bike nicked in Twickenham. The police there showed as much interest as if I'd lost a packet of fags in the pub. I never saw it again. But worth doing nevertheless.

Anyway, the owner of this MTB, spotted - literally - at York market this morning, has set up his own bike-marking scheme: vibrant yellow spattered onto jungle green.

How much use this will be in assisting the police if it gets abducted to a lockup I don't know, but it looks striking. No doubt the York heritage lobby will try to stop it.

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.)

Bend ahead: Another quirky student bike design

This curious invention was featured in the Daily Mail yesterday. A student designer has devised a sort of bike-with-brewer's-droop that folds around lampposts and self-locks to them.

Hmm. Looks a bit cumbersome to us, and doesn't protect the wheels. In bike parking solutions, simple is usually best. We think Anthony Lau's Cyclehoop, and a couple of decent locks, are more practical.

Still, it's good to encourage novel approaches to bike security, because theft is a big problem. We also learned yesterday from BikeHugger that, when the original Star Trek series was being filmed, Leonard Nimoy - with Spock-like logic - used a bike to beat the lunch queues. William Shatner - with Kirk-like excitability - got so fed up being beaten to the burger and fries that he stole the bike.

The Rack Enquiry: Why top deck is best at Euston

The two-tier parking racks, installed last year at Euston station, are proving popular. All the undercover spaces, on both conventional racks and two-tier units, were taken (right) when I dropped in the other day.

(I'd cycled up to the station to sort out a ticket query, because it was faster than waiting at home on hold to Virgin Trains' call centre in India.)


The other two-tier rack nearby, a half-uncovered one, was only half-full (right). That wasn't a surprise given the Easter monsoons. But what puzzled me was why everyone had chosen the top tier to park their bikes. When they were installed, I'd thought the top would be avoided as too cumbersome.


Ah - so that's the answer (right). On the downstairs rack was this lone wheel, the snapped cable serving as fossil evidence of what else was once there. Somewhere in a crackhouse council flat, a bike-torso is now doubtless stacked up with other looted ironmongery.

Both decks offer the same fastening possibilities: a hinged kind of metal half-trombone shape that you can D-lock your frame and back wheel to. But presumably the top deck is that bit more awkward for thieves - and conspicuous, given the manoeuvring necessary to get access to the bike.

And when stealing a bike, time is clearly of the essence. You don't see many cycle thieves with the patience to stay on hold to Virgin Trains' ticket enquiries phone line.

My art belongs to Glasgow: Free hire bikes coming on trust

Exciting news from Glasgow, where 50 white bikes will be left out around the city for the public to use for free from 16 April to 3 May.

It's an art event called the White Bike Plan, and organisers say they hope karma will prove effective at punishing anyone who nicks one of the bikes.

Theft and vandalism has plagued similarly trusting schemes in the past, most notoriously in 1960s Amsterdam (right), when most of them ended up chucked in canals, stolen, or smoked.


Well, trust is a wonderful and precious thing. Too precious to waste on people, if you ask me.

After all, look what happened to this bike (right) we spotted at East Midlands Parkway station this weekend. It had only been shackled up by the carrier rack, so the thief merely had to undo the bolts to get at the bike.

It would have a time-consuming, though not unpleasant, task. Simply cutting through the cheap cable lock would have been quicker. But as anyone knows who's waited for a train at the desolate and remote station, any way to fill in time is welcome.

Let's hope that karma catches up with the thief. A karma with two bottles of Buckfast inside it.

Where there's a wheel...

Bike theft is a constant problem in London. One of the thieves' favourite targets is the bike that's only secured by the front wheel. They can quick-release the rest of the bike from it and walk off with it, leaving the lone wheel to tell the tale.

No bike is safe, as this picture from Camberwell New Road the other day shows.

Juggling ideas about half-stolen bikes

A couple of weeks ago, London's bike racks seemed festooned with wheelless frames.

Yesterday it was the other way round, with cycle parking apparently a nesting-ground for frameless wheels (top, Barbican; middle, Southwark Bridge Road), the remainder of the bike having easily been liberated without the need for bolt-cutters.


Are the two types connected? Are theft patterns changing to reflect different types of carelessness among those locking up their machines?


Is this juggler anything to do with it, perhaps using the bike racks to store his equipment between street-entertainment gigs?

Biking round London is full of such mysteries. None as mysterious as the Horseferry Road contraflow, though, about which more tomorrow...

Steal frame: Ad bike in Brick Lane

I don't like ad-bikes that take up proper parking spaces or get in the way, but I've no problem otherwise. Like this lemon-yellow one, in Brick Lane this afternoon, advertising the Thrift Store.

But you know how if you see a van with 'shopfitters' on the side, you see it as 'shoplifters'? Well, given the reputation of the market here for flogging stolen bikes, you can't help reading it as Brick Lane Theft Store.

Turn those unwanted gifts into decoy bikes

Bike theft in London is booming. Over 18,000 were stolen in Westminster alone in the last year, up 1,000 on the previous 12 months. Now Boris Johnson is being asked to increase the use of 'bait bikes' to trap thieves, according to the Press Association yesterday. It's something our cycling mayor knows all about: he says he's had seven taken over the last decade.

He's not alone. Lance Armstrong and David Cameron (twice) suffered the same fate recently; and Muhammad Ali, the story goes, got into boxing by accident when his bike was nicked.

I had a bike thefted in 2005 in that hotbed of cycle larceny, Twickenham (I'm not joking - apparently it is). I came out from a convivial curry with friends to find an empty rack, and did that ten-minute wandering-in-disbelief thing. Had I locked it somewhere else? Had I come by bike at all? Did I ever have a bike in the first place? Do I actually exist, or am I someone else pretending to be me?

You feel that, at least, the removals team could leave you some sort of notification, perhaps a sticker or card on the rack, informing you the bike had been stolen, like when your car is towed away.

It had been double-locked. It was registered on immobilise.com. I reported it to the police, who were about as keen to see me again as they would an internet date whose profile photo had proved ten years old. I scoured second-hand bike shops, second-hand websites, Brick Lane. All to no avail: less then five per cent of 440,000 bikes reported stolen in Britain every year are returned to their owners.

Talk to many a lapsed cyclist and a saddening story often emerges: they used to cycle a bit until their machine was stolen, and they never got round to replacing it. (The average loss for an uninsured stolen bike is nearly £350, so it's understandable.)

Anyway, if the Met want decoy bikes for their scheme, I have a suggestion. Do a house-to-house run just after Christmas. Every other family house will have an eighty-quid thing with two wheels, bought as a present in the naive belief it was a bicycle, ridden twice, and chucked in the garage when it proved as rideable as a supermarket trolley.

It seemed a steal at the time - well, now perhaps it really can be. Bingo! Two problems solved at once!

Bike-lock inflation yes, but this is ridiculous

Bike theft is a problem in London, and 'lock inflation' has clearly taken hold. In 1979 you could use a cheap combination lock. In 1989 you needed a strong D-lock. In 1999 it was more like two D-locks.

In 2009, if this bike parked outside The Horse pub near Waterloo last night is anything to go by, you require two D-locks, a stockade and defensive moat.

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.