You can't leave your bike unlocked anywhere. Ever. At anytime. How come this isn't the initial reasoning? In fact, you can't leave anything unattended or not secured. This goes for cars, bikes, luggage, homes, i don't know what else.

There's still quite a few places on this earth where people don't even bother to lock their front doors, or don't worry about leaving their bike lying around somewhere unsecured.

What you said is mostly for true for major cities though.

Places where paranoia is still a disease..

I was surprised to see hundreds of unlocked bikes in Japan. Sounds like it's common over there: https://www.reddit.com/r/bicycling/comments/3loaqx/bikes_par...

Bike theft is also common in Japan.

Interesting, since the discussion talks about bikes laying around for 9+ months, and gathering and tagging "abandoned" bikes every 6 months.

When I was in Tokyo I saw hundreds of bikes unlocked. There was a poster with a security photo saying "bike thief." My wife mentioned it was likely that person had just grabbed the wrong bike.

I'm not saying bike theft doesn't happen in Japan, it just seems to be significantly more rare in Japan compared to most other places.

I remember hearing San Francisco was trying to cut down on the secondhand market as a way to reduce bike theft. I see Japan has a registration system for bikes. I wonder how much that contributes?

I've lived in a 250 people Swiss mountain town with 500 bed tourism and nothing was locked ever.

our brave total surveillance future does have this silver lining!

I remember Tokyo in 1998, almost every bicycle was unlocked. I hope it's still like that.

That being true doesn't mean I can't lament the fact that these shitty people exist and are able to get away with it.