[Update: The Police Bureau has just debuted their new web page for bike safety and theft info.]
This week has been good and bad for bike theft.
First the bad news. In the last 7 days there have been 39 new stolen bike listings (I haven’t published them all yet).
That’s a record for this site.
Now, the good news. The visibility of the listings is at an all-time high. More visibility = more bikes listed = more bikes recovered. This visibility is due in no small part to some recent prime time media coverage on our local FOX TV station (KPTV).
This coverage follows a nice feature in the Willamette Week a while back, and before that, another prime-time news story on local NBC station, KGW.
The funny thing about all this is that I am now getting phone calls from people without web access but who desparately want to list their bike. Yesterday a woman called me sobbing profusely, barely able to speak as she described her beloved lost steed.
download PDF.]
OK, more good news.
In the last 7 days this site has recovered two more stolen bikes (this one and this one)! This brings the total number of bikes recovered to a whopping 15 (!) since October of 2005. Great job to everyone for being alert and for regularly checking the listings.
There are also now nearly 200 people on my Stolen Bike Digest list. Most of these are bike shop employees and at least two of them are police officers (I can tell by their email addresses). These folks get an email once a week with all the listings and I encourage them to print it out and display it in their bike shop or other place of business.
And believe it or not, there’s even more good news.
I have been working with PDOT and the Portland Police Bureau to help educate cyclists about bike theft prevention and recovery. The result of our collaboration (and I used insights gleaned from comments to this post) is a brand new bicycle information card that is at the printer right now and will be ready next week!
This new card (displayed at right) has legal and safety info on one side, and bike theft and prevention info on the other. The next step is to encourage bike shops to staple this card to their receipts and make them available to their customers. The card will also be passed out at events throughout the city.
In addition to this new information card, the Portland Police Bureau’s website will soon have a new bike theft page now includes a new page on bicycle safety and theft information. In a great sign of community collaboration, they will actually be linking to my site and encouraging people to list their stolen bikes on BikePortland.org.
I’m excited at how the Stolen Bike Listings have grown. However I realize they can be vastly improved. The next step is to find a sponsor and then find a web programmer to help me design a better system…because I barely have the time to keep them going.
Stay tuned…and if you’d like to sponsor my Stolen BIke Listings or help with programming, just get in touch.