PSU students plan bike theft workshop, visual campaign

Brilliant idea!

Or even better, a sticker that says “My bike was stolen here.”

PSU & Lloyd are the hotspots.

Great idea except when there is a particular “hot spot” other parking will be taken up and the thieves will just move to the areas where these hot spots are not. As a graduate of PSU, its safe to say all bike parking racks have had a bike stolen at one time or another. Not sure of the effectiveness of this program…

The “craft” of bike theft?

Oh pish posh, cynics! Yeah the art student blah blah is silly, but the idea is so simple and replicable it’s brilliant and could spread far. Yes Derek, that’s the idea: highlight where bikes get stolen, so it happens less there.

maybe the city can ban cable locks as a public nuisance that contributes to crime…

I like that they’re thinking creatively—there’s not enough people thinking creatively about how to combat theft. But as someone who manages another university’s worth of bike racks, I’m worried about the unintended consequences. Theft is rampant. So if this idea succeeds, our bicycle parking infrastructure could get a whole lot uglier and the cost of maintenance could go up. I say “could” knowing that many city racks are scratched up and covered in stickers and tags.

However, in a space like the tram terminals or the bus mall, facilities need to meet certain design guidelines. The committees that approve these facilities may not necessarily consider bike parking a top priority and they may be less likely to approve new parking if the facilities are certain to be covered in red tape (no pun intended) and cost more to maintain.

I’d like to see an app that lets people tag online where a bike was stolen (maybe there’s one out there but nothing popular enough to cause change). Something like the Hollaback app for street harassment that, unlike police reports, allows people to understand crime in their community in real time.

If the students are set on a real world visual, what about using red ribbon? That could accomplish their goal without mucking up the racks with a lot of glue and tape that’s sure to turn a muddy brown in Portland weather.

Interesting. I’d have thought that locking them to other objects, or to themselves would correspond to higher rates of theft. But is is harder to mark those locations in ways that others will readily understand. This approach suggests that bike racks, which are intended to provide an extra measure of safety are ‘unsafe.’ Perhaps this then has more to do with the locks than with the location?
It seems like these folks have introduced a semiotic difficulty by choosing to communicate the risk of theft spatially (easier) than along one of several other axes that may be better predictors of risk.

Young people live their lives online today. Why not develop an app that ties in to police bicycle theft records?

I’m excited about how this project could actually help reduce the number of bike thefts. My concern is that in it’s current design, the program is simply calling attention to a problem, rather than empowering people to act on a solution. As described here, it will only increase the perception that one’s bike is not safe at a given location, and will not reflect any data as to how a bike was stolen from that spot. In theory, a bike could be locked up with dental floss, stolen, and red ribbon attached to the rack — and thus mistakenly convey that the site is “unsafe” despite the fact that any bike locked up there “securely” could be reasonably expected to be there when the owner returns.

By and large, what we see city wide is most bicycles stolen are not locked up at all (this is direct from the Portland Police Bureau stats). Second to that, it’s overwhelmingly likely that a cable lock was used when a locked bicycle is reported stolen. Given this, I think it would be best if this project were able to convey a slightly more sophisticated message, a la “warning; my cable lock did not prevent my bike from being stolen at this location”.

At PSU, we currently tag our bicycle racks with a decal that shows proper locking technique, strongly advises against using a cable lock, and lets riders know they can borrow a loaner-lock from the PSU Bike Hub if they forgot theirs. To further our fight against bike theft, we do not sell cable locks at the Bike Hub (you can buy a U-Lock with a cable to protect your wheels though) and we continue to push the message about the inadequacy of cable locks through our marketing and communications about bicycle commuting. Together, these efforts have helped reduce the opportunity for theft. In 2012, we saw a 30% reduction in reported bicycle thefts compared to 2011.

Where I see promise in this art project is the ability to transform the message about bicycle security into a personal one. Testimonials, especially when carried out in a creative way like this, can be very powerful in helping to create behavior change. I’m really looking forward to the workshop and seeing how this project continues to take shape!

A few years ago a group in Seattle created an app called BikeWise, http://www.bikewise.org/, which allows people to post road hazards, wrecks and stolen bicycles on a map. While the app is Seattle-centric, you can log in items for your own community. I have posted bike hazards from Sitka, Alaska, but I had to manipulate the map so it showed my area and not Seattle. When people post reports in some of the bigger cities, the report gets forwarded to the local DOT or police department.