Fight Bicycle Theft With the Open Source Bike Registry

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "No one wants to buy a stolen bike, but if you see a bike you're interested in on Craigslist or at a flea market, there isn't a good way to know if it's stolen. Now Kickstarter has an interesting project that is looking for funding to expand a searchable database that will help users protect their bikes by permanently saving the bike's serial number. 'We regularly saw people trying to sell stolen bikes, and would search for the bikes online — but it was too difficult to find definitive information about them because too few people save their serial numbers,' says Seth Herr, founder of the Bike Index and lead developer of the project. Herr envisions Bike Index as a way to solve the 'awareness problem' — awareness of existing registries and of a bike's identifying information. 'A common problem when people get their bikes stolen is that it's like the first time the owner thinks about "What was my serial number?" and other details that are important in recovering a stolen bike,' says Marcus Moore. If every bike shop integrated Bike Index registration at the point of sale, that would make it easy for victims of bike theft to accurately report a stolen bike, and for bike purchasers to verify that they aren't buying stolen goods. The Project plans to collaborate with Bryan Hance, the founder of stolenbikeregistry.com, one of the Internet's first-ever registries to track stolen bikes, which already has almost 20,000 bicycles in its registry."

Comments

This is retarded

[rebelwarlock]

If your bike is stolen by someone dumb enough to sell it as-is, this would work great. But most bike thieves dismantle it, shuffle the parts, repaint everything, and file those numbers off. How will a registry help you then?

Re:If the number's filed off...

[mark-t]

It only makes it unsellable to people who would bother to check such a registry in the first place... which are the same people who wouldn't have bought a bike they couldn't check or were able to find that it was stolen in the first place. It doesn't harm the seller in the least.

Re:How about privacy?

[dkleinsc]

Yeah, because the serial numbers and mandatory registrations have done so well to stop automotive theft.

They help a lot when a cop sees the car in question in between wherever it was stolen from, and the chop shop it's going to. Most importantly, it helps distinguish the stolen red Honda Civic from all of the legitimately owned red Honda Civics in the area, so the cops don't spend time chasing after the wrong car.

The reason cops don't go heavily after bike theft is that it's a relatively petty crime: A $200 theft is a very different animal from a $20,000 theft. I just wish that they spent an appropriate level of effort on those $20,000,000 thefts out there.