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

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.

UK already has this

[MrL0G1C]

The UK police have regular bike registering events where you can take your bike and register it for free, otherwise the service is commercial and costs money ( http://www.bikeregister.com/ ).

Wiggle.co.uk simply put the serial number on the new bike check list which came with the bike, so all the customer has do do is keep that list, Can't say if other bike merchants do the same.