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Comment by scoofy | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

Saws don't care about the pins in the lock.

If the frame is sawn, that kinda defeats the rationale for theft.

Another commenter suggested sawing the seat post.

I am curious about that too. Will the bike take a standard replacement seatpost?

The joke’s on you: there is no standard seat post size!

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.

To note, there's many levels of bike theft, some will steal for parts.

You'll hear from people getting their seat post or rear wheel stolen for instance. Yes, seriously.

The bike in the article doesn’t do much to prevent component theft. The frame is the difference maker.

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.

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