Our friends with the Safe Routes to School program in Eugene have just announced the theft of an entire fleet of bikes used in their bike education classes. Program manager Shane MacRhodes says a trailer containing 40 Bike Friday bicycles and related gear totaling about $30,000 was stolen from a parking lot at Prarie Mountain School in West Eugene.
Here’s more from MacRhodes:
“… last seen Saturday about Noon. The church group at the school said they didn’t see the trailer there on Sunday morning at 6:30. The City of Eugene Bike Safety Instructor arrived at the school early Monday morning and saw that the trailer was gone and called to report it.”
Here’s a closer look at the 20-foot Cargo Mate trailer…
Also inside the trailer were:
40 Reflective safety vests
45 Helmets
Full Park Tool kit & repair stand
3 walkie-talkie radios (Midland
6 traffic safety signs (stop, yield, one-way, pedestrian)
small air compressor (Orange Black & Decker) & extension cord
Bike floor pump (yellow Topeak Joe Blow)
Tubes and parts
The bikes are owned by the 4J School District and the City of Eugene staffed the bike education program. Watch for these bikes popping up on Craigslist and/or appearing on streets in your neighborhood. If you have any leads or information, please contact Shane MacRhodes at (541) 556-3553.
Thanks for reading.
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Those look like VERY unique/unusual bikes. Hope they are found and returned.
ouch..those are some nice bikes.
shame and bad karma on the thieves…
That is very sad. The worst depths of hell are reserved for bike thieves, and the even deeper depths are reserved for children bike thieves. Is it just me or are there a lot more bike thefts going on.
Kiel, the ‘s on children is very important to convey your message here. That is unless you think bike thieves under the age of 18 deserve a very special hell.
Thanks for the correction, I meant adult bike thieves who steal children’s bikes. If a child steals a bike they probably needed it more than the owner so it is okay.
Stealing a bike is not ok, even if the thief is a child.
Unless you need that bike to escape zombies.
I wonder if they weren’t interested in the trailer?
My guess is the bikes will be dumped somewhere once they find what is inside and realize that they can’t sell them.
Agreed. Trailer thefts are huge in Lane County. The probably didn’t know the contents unless it was an inside job.
Thank You for spreading the word!!!!
Inside the trailer were Bike Fridays designed and built for the Safe Routes to School Program. They are unique. They are the first bikes of their kind built and delivered. Called OSATAs, the bike frame can be adjusted to fit anyone from 4-foot-6 to 6-foot-4. Co-Founder Alan Scholz designed these bikes to be fleet bikes after Shane MacRhodes came to us. All 40 are green. They will be impossible to miss. We will be producing them for the public in the near future. Until then, these are the only ones like it out there.
Must be the same bright criminals that stole the Renovo bikes.
You mean because they are both custom bikes it would be very hard to re-sell? I think that is where the similarities ends.
I don’t think we have any evidence that the trailer thieves knew of the contents, or were necessarily interested in the contents. With the Renovo bikes, I haven’t heard that they stole anything else, so their (misguided?) focus appears in that case to have been the bikes themselves.
This really sucks. Green Gear / Bike Friday in Eugene put a lot of time and effort into designing and building these bikes specifically to use in bike education programs. Very few companies can match the social and environmental consciousness that the Bike Friday folks live by. I highly recommend them if you are looking for a commuter bike that folds in seconds to take on the bus or a touring / all-around bike that packs in a suitcase, folds to fit in your trunk, and rides like a full size bike.
I take it that for some reason, a tracking device and service like LoJack wouldn’t work for something like this school district trailer…otherwise, it probably would have been equipped with one. Link to LoJack’s ‘how it works’ page:
http://www.lojack.com/car/pages/car-works.aspx
Seems like this could be very helpful in recovery of stolen gear.
I’m a shop owner and a Bike Friday user–does Green Gear have pictures and maybe serial numbers they can send out? Do these bikes have ID plates on them like many Fridays?
Were those bikes recovered? They might look like these:
https://bikefriday.com/osata-at-srts