Bike Index, America’s leading bike theft registration and recovery organization, has released their annual report and it paints a picture of widespread loss with an estimated 2.4 million bicycles stolen nationwide each year. Of those, 118,942 were reported stolen in the Bike Index registry last year, an increase of 15% more than 2023. The report also details that beyond the loss of a vehicle and other challenges theft poses for victims, the fact that bike theft is woefully underreported by victims and law enforcement agencies remains a big hurdle to turning the tide.
Portlander Andrew B. had his bike (estimated value, $5,000) stolen from his garage in southeast in early December. He almost didn’t even bother contacting the Portland Police Bureau about it because, “they did nothing” when he tried to file a bike theft report on two previous occasions. But this time he had an ace up his sleeve he thought would lead to a different response. “I remembered that this particular bike had an Apple Airtag concealed inside it, so I could see exactly where it was located,” he shared with BikePortland earlier this month. With this information, Andrew contacted the PPB and got in touch with an officer, who helped him create a file in the PPB’s evidence system. Unfortunately after the file was created, Andrew says the officer, “did precisely nothing.”
The lack of urgency and assistance from police (which is notably different than how they’ve responded to auto theft) is why many people don’t even bother to report stolen bikes through official channels. In their new report, Bike Index estimates 40% of bike thefts nationwide are not reported to police. And since 2021, law enforcement agencies across the nation have simply stopped reporting many crime statistics, including larceny (which bike theft falls under).
In their new report, Bike Index says, “The problem of underreporting remains a significant challenge in accurately assessing the true scope of bike theft. With many incidents going unreported, we likely will never know the exact number of bikes stolen each year.”
To try and estimate the scale of the problem, Bike Index partnered with the Institute of Transportation Studies at University of California Davis and the Department of Geography at University of California at Santa Barbara. They conducted a survey with YouGov to produce an academic study that would get them closer to the actual number of bicycles stolen annual in the U.S. Their newly published research found that along with the 2.4 million bicycles stolen annually in the U.S., bicycles are 2.5 times more likely to be stolen than a car, that the majority (59%) of bike thefts occur in residential areas, and the total value of stolen bicycles in the U.S. is $1.4 billion.
In addition to a rise in e-bike thefts and smash-and-grabs from retail shops, the Bike Index report is full of important information and advice on how to prevent your bike from getting stolen. The first thing you should do is make sure your bike is among the 1.3 million registered at BikeIndex.org. That way law enforcement organizations and helpful citizens can search for your bike when they find stolen property and you’ll be able to leverage the strength of Bike Index’s recovery platform if or when thieves snatch your rig. Where you park is also a big consideration. Bike Index says to avoid bicycle parking rooms at multi-unit buildings. If you do, use at least two quality U-locks and make sure your bike is locked to something solid that can’t be removed by thieves. And residential theft is surprisingly common, so never assume your backyard shed or porch is safe.
For Andrew B., he agonized over knowing precisely where his stolen bike was being held, yet weeks passed as he got the runaround from the PPB. He began to worry that the Airtag signal’s battery would die. After hours spent on the phone trying to reach an officer to help with his case, Andrew finally got through, only to be told by the officer that he couldn’t access the evidence system. The good news was that the officer said the property where Andrew’s bike was being held was already suspected of harboring a lot of stolen goods.
But still, a month passed and Andrew heard no progress from the PPB. They walked the property, didn’t get a response from a knock on the gate, and couldn’t make a visual of the stolen bike. Andrew continued to text his contact at the PPB and tried emailing Police Chief Bob Day, but heard nothing back. Several weeks went by and Andrew even tried contacting Mayor Keith Wilson, but he received only an automated response.
Andrew told me his experience was a, “pattern of deliberately ignoring hard evidence that would easily lead to apprehending a thief.”
When I reached back out to Andrew this week to ask if there’d been any updates to his case, he said the PPB detective finally called him back and that a search warrant on the house — where his stolen bike had been stored for nearly two months — would finally be activated.
The PPB raided the house Tuesday morning. When the suspects refused to come out it led to an all-day standoff in southeast Portland that was widely reported by local news stations. The police let Andrew onto the property later in the afternoon once things calmed down a bit.
“We found the Airtag, at the base of the hedge in the backyard,” he shared. “It was next to a dead rat. No sign of the bike.”
In the end, Andrew says he’s glad his persistence helped encourage the raid and that the suspects were ultimately apprehended. But he’ll always wonder what the outcome might have been if police hadn’t waited two months before taking action.
Thanks for reading.
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During my childhood (in the Mesozoic Era – LOL), most cities and towns had a bicycle registry, where you paid a few bucks to register your bike with the police department. You’d be given a tiny metal license plate or tag to affix to your bike, and it was renewed every year or three. That system actually helped me recover a stolen bike in middle school.
But times and priorities have changed, and trying to recover a stolen bike now can actually be dangerous.
When I worked in the industry, I always told customers to buy the strongest lock possible, because none would be as expensive as a new bike.
For my part, I keep my bicycle inside my residence, locked to the hanging hook that’s bolted into the wall and not easily spotted through a window. If someone wants to steal my bike they will have to be very obvious about it.
If my bike gets stolen now, I’ll be sad and then I’ll look for another bike. When it comes to my stuff, a certain level of emotional detachment has become necessary these days.
You must report the theft even if the system is going to fail, apathy is sure to worsen the problem that already sucks.
The cut cable lock in the pic is useless unless you are sitting 10 ft away and prepared to tangle with a likely desperate thief that’s always ready to brawl.
The airtags need to be smaller so they can be inside the frame, they cannot be utilized in many situations where they could really be more useful.
It’s anecdotal but back in the day when there was a map of the reported stolen bikes in Portland on this site I would check it occasionally and read where and how bikes were being stolen. More often then not half of them would say the bike was unsecured or poorly secured in a car, garage, shed, backyard, or some other private location. It may be changing today with the availability of cheap angle grinders but it seems like most of the bike thefts in this town are ones of convenience. So lock your bike up even if it’s in your house and only to itself so that it at least can’t be easily ridden away.
That being said someone posted on the CyclePDX subreddit recently about having their bike stolen from in front of the downtown library in broad daylight. I’ve been eyeing various angle grinder resistant locks like the Hiplok for years but damn are they expensive. I did see a video the other day for the OnGuard RockSolid u-lock that looks rather promising and it’s cheaper and lighter than the Hiplok. I just replaced my Fahgettaboudit Mini a few months ago though so I’ll probably continue to rely on it and the fact that my bike doesn’t look new and would be quite hard to flip quickly because of how I uglied it up.
When I complete surveys about riding in Portland, my response to questions about hesitancy are always about secure parking. When I worked downtown and had secure bike parking I never hesitated to go by bike any time of the day. Now my concern about whether my bike will be there when I return generally determines my mode of transportation.
Theft and petty vandalism are big concerns of mine as well, and they also factor into my choice of travel mode.
When I lived in Portland (for 17 years), lots of accessories were stolen off my bikes but I never lost a bike nor any significant parts, in spite of parking outside city hall for over 6 years when I had my PBOT job, and living in East Portland for the latter 9 years. My greatest security strategy was to take a long-shackle New York lock and hide the yellow plastic with black duct tape so that it looked like a cheap U-lock. My lock wound up with lots of scuff marks (as well as the chainstays that I placed my lock around a no-parking sign or staple rack) where thieves would try to pry off the lock with a bar, but they never even tried to use an angle-grinder on it (which were common enough even then.) I used the U-lock in combo with a 7-foot braided cable (no lock) which would go around my bags and the front wheel.
I currently live in a bucolic community of 300,000 where bike theft is pretty much limited to college campuses and within a block of the two homeless shelters, plus where folks leave their Surly bikes unlocked outside in the front yard for two weeks straight.
I help run a community bike shop where we give away about 450 bikes annually to the homeless and to local immigrants and refugees. The leading cause of bike theft, by far, is people simply not locking up their bikes at all, not even with the 10mm cable locks we give them for free (we can’t afford to give away U-locks, and why would we if they aren’t going to use them anyway?) The homeless here are notorious for losing their bikes or seeing them stolen; our immigrants and refugees on the other hand are very good about storing their bikes in secure locations. We have an ongoing frustration with many slum lords not allowing apartment tenants to bring their bikes inside units.
The problem with Airtags is the feature that prevents tracking other people also makes it easier for thieves to notice a tag is “traveling with them” and might clue them in that there is an Airtag for them to find and chuck out by the dead rat under the hedge.
Still, an Airtag is probably better than nothing, but you have a limited window in which to recover your ride.
The fact that the thieves found the air tag and were so unconcerned by it that they left it on the property instead dropping it literally anywhere else in the city is pretty telling, IMO
Maybe with the new District Attorney the word will get out the crime doesn’t pay like it did under the previous District “wanna-be social justice warrior ” Attorney let happen.
This seems like a valid caution against zoning code requirements or policies that encourage or mandate those as a way to encourage biking.
I’d agree if, when Rubio threw out the bike room requirement, she had replaced it with something better, like a good in-unit storage solution.
Note I wasn’t saying it seemed like a valid caution against all zoning requirements (as it looks like with only half my sentence quoted)–just those for bicycle rooms in multi-unit buildings.
After many years in the bike parking facility ops / design biz, there is a full universe of bike room design flaws / security levels (even in ‘Biketown USA’ with bike awareness and code), yes bike garages / rooms can be a place to steal bikes, but usually it is either owner error (not locking / ineffective locking; like the suburban garage theft scenario) or crappy parking design (cheap rack, easy to defeat bike cage/ room design, poor management, overdemand, etc.)…the blanket statement by Bike Index is not helpful…especially when there is no other option other than park on the street or carry your bike up the stairs multiple floors to an apt*.
[*My last home was on the 9th floor of a 12 story MCM building and elevator access fine was a $200, which was 4x the fine for lighting off fireworks etc. LOL. There was a crappy bike room but it had room for 5 bikes for 72+ units.]
I agree with pretty much all of that. It’s why I said it was a “caution” against code requirements for bike storage rooms, versus a “condemnation” or something similar.
Responding to that caution doesn’t mean saying bike storage rooms can’t work, or requirements for them should all be dropped. It could mean making sure that zoning requirements are written to encourage them to work, or to find ways to make sure that people building them or using them know to avoid the mistakes that make stealing easier.
I really agree with this. Another response to the caution about bike storage rooms might be to make sure that buildings allow in-unit storage of bikes, and are required to allow bikes on elevators and a route with good clearances. I remember in earlier articles about bike storage zoning requirements, there were many comments about the problem with them not being the storage within the unit, but problems getting them there due to things like building rules not allowing them in elevators, like you mention.
Can you have this Andrew B. who had his e-bike stolen get in touch with me? I may have some information that could be helpful in prosecuting this case. My phone number is 503.9l7.82l8. Thank you.
Wow cool story–like the local connection and the drama of the raid.
Portland police do have alot of things to respond to. Shootings tripled in the last few years and I think most people would put those at a higher priority. We are also one of the capitals if not The Capital of property crime in the USA which means we’re up there for the world as well.
Bike theft is the whole reason my bicycle riding dropped by 95% in 2020 and has remained there. I’m not leaving my bike locked up anywhere with any kind of lock. Without this convenience I’ve lost my ability to use a bike for pretty much every trip except recreational rides.
Seeing Jonathan’s photo: cut bike cable hanging on public rack, may be every city that installs public bike racks should secure a “cut cable lock” to each rack as a warning to the wise about secure parking.
[*Like rulers in the past who once would place ‘heads on sticks’ at the city limits as a warning about ‘good behavior’. Perhaps a major “u-lock’ company would provide the cut cable locks as an ‘educational tool’? ;-)]
You might also note where they made the cut – it wasn’t just anywhere – it was where the cable comes into the lock, the weakest point of any lock. At our community bike shop we periodically need to remove locks as the owners have lost their keys or forgotten their combinations – both are all too common, often cited as the reasons owners didn’t use the locks they have – and it’s way too easy to remove most cable locks, 10 seconds max with a standard shifter-cable cutter. For a chain lock, we typically cut at the locking mechanism. U-locks take longer – fortunately we haven’t had to deal with a forgetaboutit U-lock yet.
The main purpose of any lock is deterrence. No matter what, all locks can ultimately be cut by a determined thief or by the fire department. If your bike is valuable, or the parts have real market value (as opposed to sentimental value or the “cool” Ultegra parts you bought 25 years ago that everyone now thinks are “junk”), the thief may simply cut your frame or the bike rack itself, throw your bike into a pickup truck, and much later cut your lock at their leisure. So you need to pick and choose carefully where to park it, lock it securely for the very limited time you are there (30 minutes at most – otherwise take it inside and lock it inside), and make sure there’s some pedestrian activity near where you locked it, and hope that when the determined thief sees your bike, they move onto one of the nearby bikes that are secured with a cheap $5 cable lock. Or take the bus and leave your bike inside your home.
We should adopt the heads on sticks approach. (Sort of joking).
“Heads on sticks” for bike thievery is an awful thing to joke about. We need to use iron pikes.
According to Terri Wallo-Strauss of the PPB we only have one property crime detective for the ENTIRE city of Portland. With staffing like that it’s no wonder the majority of property crimes are not addressed.
Untrue; he doesn’t have property crime under control because he’s on strike.
Huh? The police can’t strike. Are you saying the lone property crime detective is not doing his or her job and on “strike”. If so, what is your evidence of that belief?
Evidence? I read it in the BikePortland comments section many, many times. It must be true. There is literally no other explanation for why Portland has crime.