Hacker News Reader

Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

Hahaha this is really some "why does water flow down" level shit. Bikes in NL get stolen by junkies, homeless, generally people without many options and definitely without the ability to do organized crime. They sell it asap, by circling around random people and saying "hey wanna buy a bike?" and then they buy whatever hit/food they needed to steal and sell the bike for. It's a pretty sad situation IMO, but it's no mystery.

I know lots of people who bought their own bike back at some point in life, and even more who never bought a bike from anyone other than someone like this. Bike theft in NL really is the pettiest of petty crimes and I'm confused about what makes MIT, of all places, decide to try and figure this out.

View on HN

Maybe in NL, but in US/Canada organized bike theft is a bit more than "pettiest of petty crimes". For example: https://bikeindex.org/news/closing-the-loop-a-deep-dive-on-a...

A number of my friends have had $10-30k of bikes stolen. Based on the surrounding circumstances, at least some, if not most, were targeted by an organized set of individuals and not just random.

One of the things that make bike culture stick is that most bikes are just really cheap those places. On one hand this means they're protected relatively less and so would be rather easy to pick up, on the other it means no one bothers organising a theft ring as the returns are too low. Fancy bikes are something completely different and would attract another level of organised crime.

I can't recommend enough putting your bikes on your renters or homeowners insurance. There is no lock that is cut proof, and even if there was, your components can just get stripped or the rack itself even could be cut. If you have insurance, however, its not even a couple bucks a month extra on my policy to get the bike on there for zero deductible coverage, and offers me a lot of piece of mind.

This is contradicted by the article's findings that a substantial fraction (22/70) of bike thefts in Amsterdam flow through an organized system

> The scholars found that still another 22 of the bikes made such sufficiently similar movements that they seemed to be part of the same “subnetwork” of bikes.

> This research makes it clear that part of bicycle theft is organized.

Beyond learning specific things about the flow of stolen bikes in Amsterdam, the research is part of a broader body of work by Senseable City Lab that uses these trackers to try to understand the flow of physical goods through complicated/emergent systems.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com