Hmm... be careful not to use that locking feature when 'locking' it to a regular sign post. When I lived in NYC, my roommate's bike was stolen when a thief just removed bolts holding the sign and then he just lifted the whole bicycle and the lock over the post. He then bolted the sign back on. We saw the surveillance video from a neighbor's surveillance camera and the whole thing took under 3 minutes. We initially assumed the lock was defeated but this was a much more ingenious way.
In some jurisdictions there is a statutory value of a road sign higher than the actual cost to replace it. It's usually enough to make stealing the sign a serious misdemeanor or minor felony.
I agree it's a serious issue that should be taken seriously. The statutory value approach is one of many possible ways to address it, though. It leans on other laws for theft, larceny, vandalism, or destruction of property with a fictional sum rather than just making the theft or destruction its own offense. I'm not aware of places that take both approaches, but those may exist. Prosecutors do like having options, including bringing multiple charges for the same act.
Only someone who assumes they have the right-of-way through an intersection when they don't see a sign, and can just blow through without looking if anything is coming.
Even in stop-sign-happy North America there aren't stop signs everywhere there could be stop signs; every licensed driver must know what to do at an uncontrolled intersection.
So do people who mistakenly blow through a stop sign or make any other potentially fatal mistake.
I regret to say that I don't see the point of this remark.
As a licensed driver you're required to know what to do when approaching an unguarded intersection where you clearly do not have right-of-way, and not interpret the lack of a stop sign as a green light.
Some countries have a more finely developed concept of right of way than the USA and Canada. They have signs which indicates right-of-way paths through intersections via map-like diagrams. Also, signs which indicate a change in right-of-way status of the current road.
Removing a sign which negates a road's right-of-way status will likely cause an accident.
Stolen bikes frequently get tossed onto a truck full of bikes. Even if the frame is a goner, it'll scrap. The rest of the components can be resold / used to patch up another bike.
In Barcelona many "stolen" bikes are actually the council taking them because you are not allowed to park bikes against sign posts.
You can get them back. Unless you have one of these bikes.
Pity the folk that loose their keys. Some times a crap lock is useful as a deterrent but you don't want to make it hard to get your own bike unlocked by people authorised to do so, including yourself.
Cool idea t'ho if your only problem is lazy thieves riding off with your bike.
This post is one of a long line of my "more security is not _necessarily_ better security" posts.
That's exactly it, most locks (bike or otherwise) are to reduce thefts of opportunity, or to otherwise discourage things. Bike chains and locks and the like can be clipped within seconds with the right tool (you can even get battery-operated hydraulic clippers these days, see e.g. [0]).
But if it's noisy or visible, it's discouraging.
Anyway, instead of paying a premium for a bizarre frame contraption, buy a cheaper bike with enough lock to discourage a quick snatch. It won't be worth the effort to steal on the one hand, and it'll be cheap to replace on the other.
If you get an expensive bike instead, get theft insurance and make sure there will be visible evidence of theft if it gets stolen (e.g. clipped chains or whatever).
I would be wary of insurances that require visual proof since that’s really never guaranteed.
The insurance my friend got only needed proof that he purchased a sufficient lock, which they do tell you beforehand, so you can just keep the bill as proof. Also, they need the police report. He got his money quickly. (This happened in Germany.)
He even had one of those fancy GPS tracking looks-just-like-a-normal-tail-light. Neither the police nor the insurance cared and since he didn’t want to confront the thief (or more likely the buyer) all on his own when he got a signal a couple of weeks later he just dropped it …
I once asked a construction worker (with the help of my former boss who worked in a supermarket and vouched for me) to help me cut open a friend’s bike (she went on a school trip, the day before the key broke in the lock, so she asked me to take care of it so no one can steal it). He used a gas powered angle grinder to cut it open. No one even seemed to look in our direction in the middle of the day in the city center.
My five-year-old once managed to change the code on my bike lock while I was locking it, without me noticing before I scrambled it. Couldn't get it open after many guesses. We were outside a supermarket, so I went inside and bought a hammer, and smashed the lock to bits. Nobody even looked at me twice.
My experience is that locking your bicycle publicly can be good for you – while locking your bike in an unexposed place can be bad.
The best place is one:
* which is not visible from the street
* still has some public traffic (aka "someone could exit the building at any time")
* the bikes next to yours are worse protected than yours
I am faring quite well with this strategy for 10 years now and haven't had a single bike stolen from me despite using the bike as my main mode of transportation. In the same time my collegues had theirs stolen roughly every 2 years.
I've had thieves steal components off my bike in broad daylight on a busy street. I think it's best to park your bike in a place where there's not a lot of foot traffic.
I suspect removing safety signs may be seen more gravely than theft of personal property. Putting the sign back means you committed one crime rather than two.
In my experience, they don’t. But it was just a street-name indicating sign that was removed to make way for a sidewalk cut, tossed aside and never re-mounted. Eventually some scrapper took it I bet.
You could use an Earth lock. They securely fasten your bike to the ground using a focused graviton beam. Works anywhere on earth, but requires a beefy frame.
that's what i am using now, if a dutch bike qualifies. plus a lock through the wheels to prevent the application of kinetic energy by causing a high amount of friction.
yes, exactly. my point is, that this problem is not specific to the unusual lock described in the article, but is really an issue with any lock and therefore not really relevant.
One of the better ways of preventing the theft of a bike in a city (aside from bringing it indoors), is to use an old, junky, beater bike. The Yerka’s unique design is an absolute thief-magnet that’s begging to be stolen.
When I was in college, I didn't have much money, like a lot of us when going to school, so I bought a beater bike at a garage sale for $5. It was a 3-speed type with big tires back before that became cool. The security mechanism was not only that it was ugly, but the 3-speed shifter mechanism was messed up and the pedals only worked if you had it just so between 2nd and 3rd gear, sort of halfway in between, otherwise the pedals would slip if you stood up on them or put much pressure on them. I never locked it. I would just put it in 1st gear and walk away. On campus I don't think anyone tried to swipe it except I noticed a few times it was laying on the ground instead of the bike rack. One time I went to the 7-11 just to grab a soda and while I was in there I hear a scream outside. I went out and saw my bike laying on the ground and some guy hobbling away grabbing at his groin. My friends would ask me "how can you ride that thing" and I would say, very carefully.
Where I live, your bike would still be stolen. Bike thieves here don't generally ride the bikes they steal, they ride their own bike and kind of hold the stolen bike with their other hand and tow it along. Also they would steal any bike.
Ya, I heard in some big cities now days they drive around in trucks with bolt cutters and grab the bikes and toss them in the back of the pickup and are gone in seconds.
I had a bike like that (quote a friend of mine after borrowing it for someone else: "That bike is plain dangerous!") stolen after I left it on a bike rack on the sidewalk for a few days, since I needed it out of the flat. And it was locked - but with a flimsy lock.
The best deterrent I found? No air in the tires. Bike will remain there for weeks.
Had a loved bike stolen from me on the bus stop since I had no time to lock it. My brother found it in the schoolyard on his way to work with empty tires (tube lost air very slowly).
A friend of mine had an old junky beater bike, with a fancy new lock. He once found the bike where he left it... but, I shit you not, the lock was gone! (that was > 20 years ago)
In my younger days, I would sometimes consider a combination lock on a bike as a nice puzzle to solve. If I managed to unlock it, I would reattach it in an obviously different place to let the owner know they need a lock upgrade.
My favorite method was the guy who doesn't lock his bike at all and just sticks airtags on it and when it goes missing, calls the police who recover the bike and collect the thief
Be careful with that. Depending on where you live this can be seen as "incitement for robbery" (or whatever the correct term is) which is a crime in itself at some places even.
Read up for yourself, but I don't think that merely leaving a bike unlocked would be entrapment in any jurisdiction. The law generally requires something more, like a police officer inviting someone to go steal a bike for them.
A friend clarified this strategy for me the other day... Apparently you walk a fine line between beater not worth the effort to take and assumed abandoned and so fair to strip.
You're basically saying "don't own something nice if you don't want it stolen".
More needs to be done to tackle bike theft. Be that education, physical deterrants (cameras, good quality bike lockup locations, etc).
I've had a bike stolen, and the police can do nothing. A bicycle is small, easy to disassemble, relatively low-value, and they are untraceable items.
A car is higher-value, but more easily traced than a bike - due to a large number of factors; size, colour, shape, insurance/legal documents to prove ownership, ANPR cameras, etc.
I’m not sure how true this is. I think in general thieves steal things they can easily sell rather than things that are expensive. I would guess one could more easily sell an ordinary looking bike than a fancy looking one but maybe it can be converted into valuable easily sold parts or it just isn’t that hard to sell.
So? How does that support your argument? Even a black market operates as a market. If the value of an item increases, demand will increase, all else equal.
(1) Doesn't that severely weaken the frame? It looks flimsy, and even if the lock part is attached back, it does not look like as strong as a welded joint.
(2) The levers introduced by the long straight tubes seem to open up a physical way in. Imagine twisting the bike off the post.
(3) Once LPL shows how to open that lock, one might want to swap it for a better one. Is that possible?
As Bjornorn writes down tube are mostly stretched. Some bikes just use a wire. Incidently that could also make for a better locking system that the stiff one with cuts.
(1) was my first thought, especially on that part of the frame. i think if it was the horizontal upper bar, it would be less of a concern, because the upper bar gets different stresses.
also, this lock is way to bulky for many locking situations. i can't even think of a bike-rack where this would work. it seems to be suitable for locking to sign-posts only. (and see the comment below on that)
> (3) Once LPL shows how to open that lock, one might want to swap it for a better one. Is that possible?
Looks like a disc detainer lock. Possibly needs "A pick Bosnian Bill and He made", but as we all know, there are disc detainer locks and disc detainer locks.
I'm not sure it's a top of the line, high security cylinder. Hope it's replaceable.
Using a wire, at least, makes it less stiff in torsion since a regular «metal tube» will have bending and shear stiffness. But then, it’s a tradeoff which could be worth it for some casual bikers!
They are usually a little bit more unique, but still not particularly secure. Just something to fuck you over when you're out in the middle of nowhere and need to repair something.
Unfortunately this just reaffirms why I don't use a bike for transport. For me, the mental stress of worrying about bike theft and going through all these procedures + the depressing feeling of eventually having it stolen is greater than the actual value of the bike..
I enjoy riding my bike for fitness but when I'm done riding, it always goes back inside my apartment where it's pretty close to impossible to steal. This does unfortunately make it useless for anything but fitness. I'd love to see some systematic changes put in place to crack down on bike theft but its out of my control.
I don’t know where you live, but as the article mentions, all you really need is a good u lock or two and thoughtful placement of the bike. Avoid secluded areas and minimize the lockup time if it seems like a risky area.
My commuter bikes usually cost in the neighbourhood of $1k. I've had 7 bikes stolen in 30 years of commuting, going back to when I was a kid, across 3 cities and numerable living situations.
A year's worth of monthly transit passes (currently, where I am) costs $1200. 30 years of transit would cost $36k.
Compare that to the $7k I've spent on bikes to do the same job. I could have bikes stolen at
5 times the rate, and I would still be getting the best transportation deal around.
Sometimes I leave my bike alone for hours in kind of a sketchy place, and when I do it's in the hands of the fates. I don't let it ruin my fun. I'm way to cheap to be getting uptight about stolen bicycles.
I am too far out of the city for biking to work practically. But my current bike costs less than a yearly commuter pass. So I really appreciated your perspective shift.
Because if I were to use the bike to go into the office I wouldn't worry too much and only look at the numbers. Thanks for that.
Most people stealing bike aren't doing it as hobbyist lock pickers. Bike theft is genuinely one of the main issues with cycling as a very real transportation alternative.
Lockpicking lawyer does more than just picking. He shows many ways to break or bypass locks, often very quickly. Given a chance to review this lock, he would likely find three flaws at least. I see the word "steel" is not present in the article, which makes me think one very fast attack would just be a simple hacksaw against the seat tube. Could probably be cut in under sixty seconds if it is aluminum. But a lot of lock cylinders are poor quality and vulnerable to low skill attacks like raking.
> Bike theft is genuinely one of the main issues with cycling as a very real transportation alternative
I have advocated for various police departments to create dedicated bike enforcement units. Patrolling commute heavy areas monitoring for bike theft and enforcing laws against bicyclists.
Correct, but if the lock is trivial to defeat, you can assume people will be carrying screwdrivers / shims and whatever else is necessary to break locks.
If you need to spend 5 minutes carefully setting pins then yeah it's probably going to be safe in public.
Haha, I don't mean that there is a single universal size. I was trying to figure out if it's using a propriety seatpost as that's becoming more common.
I don't know if you just live in a vastly different place than me, but in my 20 years of biking I've only lost 1 bike to theft. I think that's a pretty reasonable cost.
A dead comment mentions having to readjust the saddle height every time you unlock the bike. Just draw a line on the seatpost with a sharpie. Easy and reversible.
That is an old trick, commonly shared or reinvented. It’s hit or miss. Usually it’s close enough you don’t notice, but some people realize something is wrong and have to readjust. Also it’s more of a one off thing. Sliding the post past the line has a habit of removing bits of the line, or obscuring it if you used a little too much grease. Not often but I have seen someone lose the line entirely by fucking around. If you were using it daily you’d get the same effect quickly enough.
Once you are really, really certain you have dialed in the right post height, I’ve known a person or two to use a scribe line. I was never that brave. Another just used electricians tape which might fit depending on how this system works.
The sticker/tape solution means you've made the choice to remove the seat post entirely when you move the seat. Since seat posts historically have been greased (to prevent galvanic action between the aluminum seat post and the steel/titanium/?? frame), that can get messy.
Most people, when they stuff their bike into their car, drop the seat post all the way into the seat tube, rather than removing it, and that can peel a sticker off (worst case, inside the seat tube).
On the way to a trip these things are trivial, but at the end of a trip, every little problem is much more likely to get on your last nerve, so finding solutions that take care of future you is a useful investment of problem solving. If it's raining and you're covered with road rash you don't want to deal with your greasy seat post for the 35th time on top of it all.
This bike is designed around removing the seat post so I wouldn't apply rules for other bikes here.
Anecdotally, I have never dropped my seat post even when stuffing a bike in the trunk and neither have my riding partners and a lot of us have carbon seat posts now so we don't grease them. Most of us are simply too iffy to mess with our riding configuration. I'm also sure professional bike fitters wouldn't use a solution that would inconvenience most of their customers. This urban frame lock bike is a very special case and should be treated as such.
Unrelated: That's how some production facilities record well-running machine configurations. "To run X product, move the rails to the blue marks. To run Y product, move the rails to the red marks." It works okay if the marks are drawn with some level of care... less well when the marks were clearly made in a rush and without a straight-edge.
I guess if two people were sharing a bike, they could each pick a color and do the same.
A 30 lb fixie (typically closer to 15 lbs) and you have to take the seat tube out to lock it: awful. It’s impractical, it’s heavy, and a quality U-lock is just as effective for protecting a very low-end bike (such as this one). Gimmick.
Your comment is needlessly rude. Soma Rush, Surly Steamroller, All-City Big Block, Wabi Special (other steel-frame fixies) are all around 20 lbs flat -- far, far less than 28-29 lbs. Slightly higher end track bikes weigh even less. This thing is a bad idea, even if its weight was reasonable. I dispute that its weight is reasonable, but that is not the only problem with the bike.
Solving a problem... partially, maybe. Tires or seat still get stolen, these look expensive to replace. You pay tons of extra money just to have something different. No way the construction rigidity doesn't suffer with extra moving parts. Over few years, its probably creaking, loose, and who knows how it behaves during an accident.
This adds mechanical complexity to a tool which is best served with as much simplicity as possible. How much does this cost over good U-lock which also holds 1 wheel?
The tires have a unique bolt similar to anti-theft lug nuts on cars and the Seat is part of the locking mechanism. You can't steal either of them without the key or unique lug nut socket.
This makes a lot of unfounded assumptions about what the police can and would do. There's not a lot the police can do after a bike is stolen within proportion to the value of the stolen bike and bikes are both easy to steal and easy to scrap for parts (that are practically untraceable in most cases). So what do you end up with? More police patrols in "high crime" neighborhoods and more "spot checks" (a la stop and frisk), both approaches that have been demonstrative failures for decades but satisfy the political pressure to "do something".
A better long-term solution would be to reduce the need for policing by mending the socioeconomic conditions that result in bike theft. Rampant bike theft isn't a global issue and is actually less of an issue in some countries that have a lot more bikes on the streets per person than any city in the US does. The difference isn't better policing. Aside from the fringe issue of organized crime, most bike theft is associated with addicts trying to make a quick buck to buy drugs and we already know police isn't the answer to reducing drug addiction.
>This makes a lot of unfounded assumptions about what the police can and would do.
In a lot of places they do absolutely nothing. A lot of bikes show up on sale on places like FB Marketplace shortly after they're stolen, cops could easily go set up meetings with these thieves if they wanted to. You can have god knows how much evidence or pictures or whatever of the thief but they do nothing. If I was selling stolen cars online, they'd be allover me, but bikes don't matter apparently.
>There's not a lot the police can do after a bike is stolen within proportion to the value of the stolen bike and bikes are both easy to steal and easy to scrap for parts (that are practically untraceable in most cases).
Sure, if you look at the value of a single bike this is true. But generally professional bike thieves steal multiple bikes and it ads up. Here in Finland, in 2020 insurance companies paid 11 million euros worth of compensation for stolen bikes. And that's just the ones which were reported & still worth something.
There's other things they can do rather than just more patrols. At my university town in the UK the police would plant bait bikes and watch from afar, arresting thieves after they rode off. I know they caught some, because they caught someone from one of my lectures.
That works against organized crime (and only until they wisen up to the practice and learn to spot bait bikes or the cops planting them) but not against people stealing bikes for a quick buck. If you're at that point in your life where you steal bikes to sell them for a little bit of cash, the risk of a bike being bait doesn't seem like much of a deterrent.
It's also not scalable, which means decisions will have to be made about where it is implemented, which will likely prioritize wealthier areas over poorer ones.
This was my first thought as well. After I got a better lock that wouldn't give after twisting the bike multiple times, they just destroyed it out of spite.
I'm no proponent of broken window fallacies, but I think having an environment where petty theft is harder to pull off has second order/third order effects.
Like people more willing to ride bikes in the first place, less mental burden in general, and I'd wagger it has an impact on street life and how long people would want to spend time outside instead of privately monitored malls and shopping facilities.
Theft is the main thing? How about a population of drivers that pay zero consideration that a bicycle is something to be concerned. Bike friendly places to ride the bikes are bigger holdback where I am.
There's no reason for that. You can make your point without antagonistic trolling.
To respond to your criticism, the "proper precautions" that I'm taking are to discuss/rally people to consider politically forcing the police to take it more seriously. Because bike locks don't work.
The problem with this design is that it makes it a lot easier to have a big lever (eg. using a bolt cutter) on the frame. That's why folding locks are effective: Not because of their raw strength but because of their awkwardness that makes finding a lever harder.
The real solution would be a police that takes bike theft seriously.
This seems wildly impractical to me and I doubt this solution is good for the structural integrity of the bike.
It will take long, especially if you have to readjust the ride height every time you want to use your bike. You will also only be able to park your bike at pole, not in a bike parking spot or storage facility.
A minor quibble: the frame of the bike is being used as the hasp of a lock. The actual lock is not discussed at all. If it is anything like most of the mainstream locks on the The Lock Picking Lawyer's Youtube channel it will be easily defeated without damaging the frame.
There are 5 jump cuts in the sequence to demonstrate the lock feature in the promotional video and it is only demonstrated once. If even the marketing material is glossing over a USP, then it's a bad sign.
The thought of sliding the seatpost in and out twice (4 times?) every time you end a journey is not good. I had a folding bike with a very long seatpost that moved as part of the fold. Admittedly it was 80% exposed while riding, but it got dirty and gritty very and it isn't realistic to carry a rag and assembly grease with you so it got scratched, required more force over time and became unpleasant to use.
Also, this is a very solvable problem, but no seatpost means that the frame can fill with water in the rain.
Good if you can find an unoccupied pole or ultra low density bike rack. Presumably clunky in a normal bike rack (which are clunky at the best of times).
The one thing that springs to mind, is I wonder how robust, and long-lasting this will be?
Bikes get put through a fair bit of abuse, and the mechanism looks like it might have problems with said abuse.
Robustness is often the Achilles' heel of innovative design. I used to work for a defense contractor, and it was amazing what came back from the field; even when it was packaged in one of those "floating rack" cases.
I had a similar thought, but this strikes me as a city commuter bike. While I used my daily driver a lot, I wouldn't say I used it hard. This probably has a lot of the same structural concerns as a convertible car...servable, but probably less likely to serve after an accident.
This is a great idea! I want to temper the enthusiasm of potential buyers, though: although this might prevent your bike from getting stolen, it won't help against vandalism, and I've spent hundreds of dollars on vandalism. The last time my bike was vandalized was two months ago, and it cost $200 to fix (they twisted the handlebars around until the cables snapped).
I wrote a blog piece about how to keep your bike locked up overnight, outside in San Francisco for years, [0] and the take-away is this: it averages $80 - $100 / month in repair costs, and you're much better off getting a bike rental membership (e.g. Citibike, Bay Wheels) for $15 / month.
> You also won’t have to worry about your tires being stolen. That’s because they feature unique nuts that can only be undone with a special adaptor which comes with the bike.
So do you have to carry the special adaptor when you go riding, in case you get a flat and need to put on a new tube? Not a huge deal, but kind of annoying.
So there are these bars that swing out from the frame. The bottom one holds the lock while the top one holds the seat tube. I wonder if you strike the top one with a sledgehammer right by the pivot point, would it shear the bolt that holds that tube to the frame? Could be a quick attack.
I'm curious and optimistic about alternate lock setups like this. I'm a heavy bike user, and a lot of the situations where theft is likely are also ones where carrying a good lock can add significant friction to the activity. Things like running an errand a neighborhood over, beach, sports game, quick trip to grocery store, etc.
And anyway a common wisdom I believe is that if someone targets your bike specifically they will have it. This (or any) doesn't have to be a better lock per se, it just needs to be no worse and not make your bike more of a target.
I have no insight or really even educated guesses about the quality or value of this specific one though. It looks like 6ku or retrospec or something which cool I like those fine for city bikes.
> a lot of the situations where theft is likely are also ones where carrying a good lock can add significant friction to the activity. Things like running an errand a neighborhood over, beach, sports game, quick trip to grocery store, etc.
It's not hard it's unfun. I'm a pretty utilitarian user of bikes but the reason I use them so much is that I just enjoy the experience of riding. The weight and hassle of carrying a lock takes some of the enjoyment out, so I avoid it when I can and maybe ride a little less when I can't.
It's not a big deal it doesn't apply to everyone but the more you do stuff on a bike the more it grates.
Personally I use a chain instead of a u-lock, and just throw it into the milk crate wired to the back along with my bag/groceries/whatever. The hassle is pretty much zero and the weight's negligible. And it's a ton easier to chain my bike up somewhere than it is to try and get a u-lock around something.
If you've got one of those little tiny racks the bike stores love to put on the back wheel, I highly recommend you find a milk crate and lash it on there with some wire. It will change your cycling life to no longer have to bungee everything tightly to that crappy little rack. Put your lock in there along with a bungee net to help secure a pile of groceries.
I've wanted a light-weight, maybe even plastic, but very real-looking chain. As others have pointed out, the goal is to deter thieves not to stop them - with the right tools, all locking mechanisms are easily defeated.
There's levels of deterrence. A lot of thieves will cary bolt cutters that can crop unhardened steel chains easily. I lock my bikes with hardened steel chains but i have multiple marks on my chain where someone tried to crop the chain. If it was regular steel (or worse, plastic) they would have gotten the bike.
If someone really really wants your bike they'll cut through any chain or u lock with a angle grinder but there's a real difference between a Abus chain with 10mm shackles and a $5 chain.
Nobody at a bike shop ever suggested that to me over multiple decades, oddly enough. Now that I finally figured it out I have a milk crate wired onto the thing, as well as several carabiners hanging off of it that I use to hang my bag on one side when the crate's full of groceries.
I have had that setup but it never worked for me long term. It rattles around too much, or the mechanism that holds the lock breaks, or it won't stay put, or the mount itself gets stolen. Something always goes wrong with them and usually they're some degree of maintenance, frustration, or trouble along the way. It's a different problem that's sometimes better to have but not a solution to the lock problem for me.
Get a chain lock, wrap it around either the seat pole or part of the frame for storage/transport. There's basically nothing that can go wrong, and there's chain locks in a wide variety of costs/security. The kryptonite series 4 is well regarded and I personally like it, there's a bunch of good choices though.
They say this bike is supposed to be a city bike, then why is the seat and handlebars positionend like a race bike... it's not the most comfortable position for a bike. and I also don't see any way to carry any luggage on the bike it self.
I’d come back and find the frame attached to the post and everything else stripped off it. Not only that I bet the frame creaks and all sorts. Plus it’s going to be a lot weaker. It’s a stupid invention.
The trick is that this bike might be so bad that thieves would prefer stealing all the other bikes in view. The only realistic measure against bike theft is guarded parking or fixed installations of mini-garages (that would force a would-be breaker to blindly guess which box contains something valuable). I guess you could fit about ten of those in the space required for one car worth of parking?
How does this compare to the Dutch-bike system where there’s an integrated lock to immobilise the back wheel (terrible tubular lock though, iirc) and one would then just use a U-lock (or slightly better, a thick but annoyingly heavy chain) to attach the bike to something stationary? Reduces some of the pain of trying to find something the right size to get the U-lock through the frame and wheel. I don’t have a great sense for the prevalence of bike theft in the Netherlands compared to European or American cities however.
I first saw bikes with this when I visited Japan back in the early 2000s and thought it was a pretty neat idea. It certainly doesn't replace locking it to something but it seems like an easy extra to have.
Kudos for the inventive solution, but it is not significantly better than a good lock. Nothing is. And even that isn't really good.
An acquaintance of mine had his new and shiny bike stolen in front of his flat on a busy street over night. Well secured with awesome locks to the communal bike rack.
The thief simply cut through the rack pipe, and took bike and lock as is. Battery-powered heavy duty tools that are now easy to come by will get you anything left on the street - no matter how well secured...
When the bike is the lock and you don’t have the key it really puts a damper on why or how you steal it.
If you cut up the infrastructure that you lock to, you still have a bike in a weird position and need a key you won’t have. Most bike lock thieves focus on destroying the lock which you can’t do if the lock is the bike.
Making the structure of the bike the structure of the lock is a great idea because of this.
So what do you do when the lock breaks and you can't cut it open?
Look, I could list a dozen reasons why this is a bad design but I won't. Besides the U-lock, there has never been a widely adopted tech solution to combat bike theft. Locks which release OC gas when sawed, GPS tracking, bike registers, camera surveillance etc., none of it works as well as a solid U-lock through the frame and rear wheel attached to a solid object. Only frame-based solution I'd like to see is some universal mount standard for U-locks.
The problem with reducing bike theft is that you can't do it just by inventing new locks. You need to do all of the following: reduce the need to steal bikes (eg. sane substance & welfare policy), actively police and punish bike theft, teach proper locking techniques and make online marketplaces responsible for selling stolen goods.
Out of those, teaching proper locking techniques would be the easiest to implement. People seem to have no issue leaving a 1000$ bike locked with a 20$ cable lock unattended while they go shopping but would probably never do the same with a 4k flat screen TV. Put a $40 U-lock on it properly and you just increased the difficulty of stealing by a lot: instead of using pocket fitting cable cutters, the thief now needs to make two cuts with a noisy angle grinder. Chuck in another lock and the thief will probably just find something easier to steal.
I use a bd-1 and the seat moves everytime I fold is enterely.
Putting a center spot at the right height helped to put it back at the exact same position everytime, just within a few seconds, so it's a fairly solvable issue.
Now I'd hate to fiddle with the frame every time I park, but I guess people have different tastes.
Either this, or mount it ungreased. I guess in both cases this bike will start to creak much earlier than a regular one. If you grease it and keep it outside of the seat tube, a lot of dirt will stick to it which then makes its way into the seat tube. When it rains more water then usual getting in the bottom bracket area will be another challenge.
Seat posts, especially of a different metal to the frame (e.g., carbon or alu seatpost in a steel frame), regularly seize in place without grease (from galling or corrosion). Often in a matter of months. I’m amazed you’ve never run into this or heard of the idea in 15 years of professional cycling. Did you ever work on your own bikes?
If you’re looking for more friction than grease, you can use carbon assembly paste. But either way, you want something between post and tube.
I think they're not as ubiquitous everywhere, and different areas tend to trend toward more expensive bikes for those who do ride.
Bike theft in Japan happens, but the vast majority of people have very moderate bikes and there are millions of them, the incentive for theft is really small, and there's no real need to buy stolen bikes since bikes are already pretty cheap.
Meanwhile in somewhere like say California or Melbourne, it's not uncommon for a bike to be $1000+, sometimes much more, making them a pretty attractive target, and a market for stolen bikes exists because of that higher price, people are often looking for a deal on second-hand bikes, they may not even realize it's stolen.
I've had my extremely shitty bike stolen in Japan! It was a normal mama-chari, and I called all the usual suspects to confirm it hadn't been towed.
The main thing was that it was parked in a place it shouldn't be parked, for enough time.
Meanwhile my much nicer replacement bike is parked like 50cm away, but inside actual bike parking, and is just there. My neighbor has an even nicer bike, with a fancy GPS thingy attached to the frame, there for the taking. And it's still there!
The Completist's Guide mentions that cheaper bikes are more likely to get stolen, and I heard that from police here as well.
Though I think the general contours of "everyone has a bike anyways" is very true. They're also harder to fence cuz bikes in Tokyo are registered (not 100% but enough).
Personally, I think that just social dynamics from having real bike parking (read: not attaching to stop signs...) helps a lot as well.
- bikes are extremely easy to strip for parts and stolen parts are easy to sell for a few bucks (whereas with cars you need a chop shop and many parts have serial numbers)
- most bike locks are trivial to defeat without any skill whatsoever (if in doubt, bring a bolt cutter)
- it's impossible to distinguish a stolen bike from a not stolen bike at a glance, making them easy to transport (contrast this with trying to drive away in a stolen car after you smashed the window and set off the car alarm)
- generally bikes are comparatively low value making the immense effort required to attempt to track them down after they are stolen not worth it (contrary to what TV shows might have taught you, the police mostly doesn't spend its time "solving crimes" and they're rarely successful at that, most police work consists of catching crimes in the act (e.g. traffic violations) or arresting people already accused of crimes)
- people need money to live and some people need more money to live than others (e.g. addicts) and have few options available to them so theft can be an appealing option
So in other words, if you adjust the socioeconomic conditions for a higher crime rate to arise, bike theft will be one of the crimes to increase the most because it's a relatively easy, quick and low-risk way to make a small amount of cash if you're desperate enough to turn to crime to feed your family or drug addiction.
I don't want to say the reason bikes get stolen so much is the War on Drugs but in a way the reason bikes get stolen so much is the War on Drugs (in lieu of treating drug addiction as a mental health issue and trying to address the underlying problems causing it).
No need even for airtags if there was a culture that made proper use of serial numbers. Like registering, checking, knowing which S/N you had when it comes to registering a theft. Registering the theft in the first place, because currently that's usually seem as an attempt to get the bike back (and seen as futile), not as doing your share in preventing future bike theft, with no expectation of immediate upside. And all that not just about frame S/N, but also for those on components. And of course proper awareness that you definitely wouldn't want to buy used with manipulated S/N.
(ps: I'm guilty of all of them, not the theft part but the lack of doing my parts in the serial numbers game)
The same reason car break-ins are still a problem on public streets.
Except, while in many urban places you can pay for protected parking for your car(ie a garage), you can’t do the same for bikes. Ooneepod.com is trying to improve this in the USA in particular by offering extremely low-cost and secure ‘pods’ around urban areas for people to leave their bikes.
Note: not affiliated with Oonee in any way, I just think it’s a cool way to try and address bike thefts while also improving the public space.
> This is what car anti theft devices do AFAIK… why not bikes?
Well, with a car you can easily secure the mechanism because ... well, it's a car. Cars are huge compared to bikes and have enclosures protected from the outside world. Try that with a bike without increasing the weight while making it still hard to just break apart. Oh, and you probably need some energy to make it all work, too. Also there's costs and chip shortage. But yeah, main point is to make it actually secure within the given space and dimensions.
"1 bike stolen every 4 minutes" is an understatement; for Denmark alone 2020 had 40,000 reported thefts which is one every 13 minutes, down from a staggering 115,000 in 1995 (one every 4.5 minutes).
How does this lock to actual bike stands found in a lot of cities (at least in Europe)? Most provide a frame for a tire but no central metal bar this bike could be locked to. Examples:
These kind of bike stands should be retired anyway because they offer little protection. It's trivial to take a wheel off the bike, don't even need tools because most bikes use quick release levers.
I agree about its design, but it's not necessarily designed to lock the bike to.
It's pretty standard in some European countries to simply immobilise the bike by locking its rear wheel to the frame (some bikes come with a simple integral lock for this purpose).
This absolutely wouldn't prevent many modes of theft - but in some places, bike theft isn't such a major industry as it seems to be (anecdotally) in some cities (and in the US).
Here in the Netherlands only bikes that are used for leisure 'racing' have quick release levers. But these have no locks at all, because you only use them on biking trips, not to go into the city, go to work, school, or visit some friends. I have never owned a bike with quick release levers and I have been riding a bike more than fifthy years.
Ah, my old enemy: this useless bike stand that damages your front wheel, it's hard to lock the frame (not just the wheel) to it, and even if you do it correctly the thieves just take the whole thing including the locked bikes.
Sure, you ignore them and lock on a nearby pole. Those bike racks are useful if you're sitting outside drinking a coffee and just don't want to keep your bike upright, but completely useless if you need to leave your bike unattended.
Luckily cities (at least where I live) are coming to their senses and very slowly starting to provide decent infrastructure.
Only if you have a long lock. You'll sometimes see a lone front wheel locked to the stand, where someone ran with the frame. Most people don't lock their bike to the stand, they just use a frame lock.
Despite bikes has been the same many century, it's only portable on the path and inconvenience to other passerby. A real solution should be made foldable, won't taking up public space, lightweight to carry as your bag.
Using frame as a lock is an over-engineering idea.
> [Bicycles are] only portable on the path and inconvenience to other passerby. A real solution should be made foldable, won't taking up public space, lightweight to carry as your bag.
If you think bicycles are inconvencing pedestrians by taking up too much space, just wait until you find out about this thing we call "car".
Not impressed at all.
If any of these tubes is aluminum (I'm 90% sure the seat down tube is), a battery powered grinder can cut through it in less than 1 min. Even a handsaw would need only a few minutes.
I don't think it would be useless, you'd just have to deal with the locked-in part - probably easy to pick - and then replace the seat tube.
So, first: I don't really know anything about stealing bikes. I've just built a couple from parts, and read articles about bike theft.
AFAICT bike theft prevention is really about deterrence. It's about slowing down a thief to up the risk of them getting caught in the act. If it turns out that these bikes are desirable (which, they don't look that way to me), and it's viable to cut the seat tube then deal with the locked part in a safe place? These bikes will get stolen.
What I don't understand is where a stolen bike like this one goes to get resold. There was an article here several months ago where a group in the US was tracking stolen bikes to a shop in Mexico, and it was especially upsetting because the guy was running his stolen bike shop in plain sight on Facebook. But they were all rare, customized, or otherwise high-end mountain bikes, multi-thousand-dollar bikes that enthusiasts dream about having.
This Yerka bike is not that, it's a boring commuter bike. 'Chromoly' steel can be a great material for a bike frame, but welded steel frames have been out of fashion for a long time. If this was using high end tubing, they'd be talking about the brand of it (i.e. Reynolds 853, not 'chromoly steel'). Most of the rest of the parts are standard low/mid grade stuff that are likewise not going to excite anyone.
The wheel locks are are also a gimmick. Not because they are easy to defeat - although probably are - but because the 3-speed integrated gear hub is going to be difficult to mate to most bikes, meaning this Yerka rear wheel is not going to be in demand. The front wheel is just a front wheel, not special, so maybe if those get stolen a lot then the Yerka ones are at risk? IDK.
This is not to say the Yerka bike is not a good bike, I just wonder if the nature of the bike is as much or more a deterrent as the frame lock and special wheel nuts.
Do you think the kind of people who steal bikes are smart, rationale and business savvy? That they are educated about this very brand of bike?
I've lived on 3 continents, and one of the sad common denominators is the stupidity and lack of respect for the values of things from low-life burglars. Music instruments thieves and bike thieves are the worst.
Sadly, there is one quality they often share and that is persistence.
If you know the specific value of even a single component on your bike you are in a tiny tiny minority of bike users already. That's cool me too. Just we should keep that in mind in this context probably.
It's actually pretty relevant. I got fed up of my bike being stolen in London so I bought a fancy anti-theft bike and a serious lock. The result was that instead of my bike being stolen in one piece all of the components were stripped off it, which wasn't really any better.
But the "use for themselves" thief is deterred with even the cheapest U lock (even with a moderately strong cable) as long as it's not trivially pickable.
First, if you saw through the frame then this bike becomes a lot less useful.
Second, essentially every bike lock can be defeated quickly by somebody who’s motivated with the right tools. Bike locks are theft deterrent, not theft prevention. Make it harder to steal than the bike next to yours and you’re generally good. Leave a bike locked up overnight in a high-theft area and you’re asking for trouble regardless of how it’s locked up.
$700 for a single-speed bike with this goofy gimmick frame-lock, $800 for a three-speed. Nah, I think I'll stick to the beat-up seven-speed I spent $300 on several years ago and a cheap chain.
I was going by the last sentence of the article: It comes in two flavors, either single- or three-gear, which cost $699 and $799 respectively.
If you go to Yerka's site it does say that "The Yerka model with gears incorporates sealed gears inside the hub which means less service, more reliability and you will be able to shift without pedaling" so the three-speed might have an internal hub gear. But this also clearly implies a model "without gears".
And finally at the store page - https://yerka.store/products/yerka-v3?variant=35584723255449 - it pretty distinctly gives you an option of "3 speed" and "single speed". And has photos of a bike with one big gear behind the cranks, doesn't even have a chain guard to help keep your pants out of it. No fancy internal gear there.
