Someone broke into my building and stole a bunch of bikes from the bike room (people weren’t locking them up once inside). The few that were registered to park at the university (big silver stickers) were left alone.

Often I don’t think the bike theives check if the bike is “good”. My cousins bike was just over $150 new and was stolen. He had a cheap lock because he thought who would steal this.

I’ve been riding 10 years a moderately decent bike. No issues but I use a U lock which is decent.

Please lock through the frame. I’ve seen like 6 front wheels locked to bike racks with the rest of the bike gone..

We had hundreds and hundreds of bikes at my previous job. It was amazing. You could just hop on and go anywhere. Nearly all disappeared. As it turns out, the scruffy looking guy I saw, riding one bike and steering another with his free hand, wasn't collecting and returning them in the whee hours of the morning.

The new bikes had GPS attached, but they limited the numbers, due the theft. Those slowly disappeared, too. Last I saw, there were just a few bikes at each bike rack, compared to maybe 50 at each.

Where I live the organized thieves (as opposed to the local drunks) disassemble the bike and get rid of the frame ASAP. Same with cars, they park them in large car parks with no monitoring to see if it had a tracker, after a couple weeks they drive it off to disassemble (with fake plates to avoid ANPR)

Yeah, my acquaintance does something similar, collects ebikes and scooters with a GPS jammer, takes all the parts and dumps the frame.

A big waste imo, though newer models have trackers inside the battery - smart considering it's quickly becoming the most valuable part.

A few years ago my wife had her registered bicycle stolen after I screwed up and left the garage open. We reported it stolen and only took 3 days for it to make its way back to us. It made its way back to us because the cops stopped someone for looking like they too nice of a bike, so that's a whole other problem, but registration works.

> that's a whole other problem

Is it? Or were your cops right and doing their job?

Impossible to tell from one event, coming from someone who has been pulled over because I "didn't look like" I could afford my car.