Will He Lose The Election Along With His Bike?

 When I first became a dedicated cyclist, a brochure--distributed by Schwinn, if I recall correctly--exhorted us to lock our bikes if we were leaving them alone "even for a minute."

Good advice, that was--and is.  In fact, Rick Shone proved that it's doubly true--literally--today.

As part of his campaign to become Mayor of Winnipeg, Canada, he announced a cycling infrastructure plan that aims to, among other things, reduce bike theft.

Less than 90 minutes later, he drove his pickup truck at The Wilderness Supply, a store he owns, to talk to an employee.  He left his orange Rossin, converted into an urban single-speed in the back.  Two minutes later he returned. 

Guess what happened during those 120 seconds.

"I feel so stupid," he lamented.  He explained that he was "distracted by a question," which caused him to leave his truck and bike longer than he'd anticipated.

Of course, I hope he gets his bike back.  But I have to wonder whether that theft makes him look like a person of poor judgment and will hinder his candidacy--or whether it will underscore an issue to which he's bringing attention.

In short, will people be more or less likely to vote for him because he lost his bike through, as he admits, his own neglect?

Cyclist Robbed Of Bike At Gunpoint

In other posts, I've mentioned that when I'm riding to or from downtown or midtown Manhattan, my preferred East River crossing is the Williamsburg Bridge.  

For one thing, it has a relatively roomy bike lane.  So, even when it's crowded, I don't feel as if I'm competing for space with pedestrians, scooters or delivery workers on motor bikes.  

For another, the entry and exit points on either side of the bridge are connected to segregated bike lanes that  offer easy access to the Lower East Side, Chinatown, Williamsburg and other places.  You can reach the Staten Island and Governor's Island ferries, or the World Trade Center PATH train in minutes from the Manhattan side.

The Williamsburg wasn't always my crossing of choice, however. Even before it was refurbished, it had a better bike lane than the other bridges.  But about thirty years ago, when the overall crime rate was much higher, the neighborhoods on either side of the bridge were still considered, even by the standards of the time, high-crime areas.  I knew several cyclists who were robbed of high-end bikes at gun- or knife-point by individuals who jumped them or groups who blocked their way.

Unfortunately, it seems that such incidents are on the rise again. While I don't know any cyclists who've been so victimized recently--at least, not yet--I am reading and hearing about more incidents of cyclists losing their bikes while riding them.

One such incident happened on Saturday night.  What is particularly striking about this incident is that it took place on a designated bike path--in Madison, Wisconsin, a mecca of cycling in the middle of the country. (Some call it the Portland of the Midwest.  I wonder whether, when Portland was first becoming popular with the young, hip and "weird," someone called it the "Madison on the Pacific" or some such thing.) Apparently, a masked man stepped in the cyclist's path and pointed a gun at him.  The cyclist dismounted; the thief took it and took off.

Don't Try This At Home--Or On The Interstate

Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann has been as revered as Nehemiah and reviled as Robert Moses.  However you see him, you can't deny that he is as responsible as anyone for the kind of city Paris is, and has been for the past century-plus.

One of the things he did was to introduce a street grid. Previously, much of Paris--especially the old districts like Le Marais--were laced with streets narrow streets that zigged, zagged and curved.  If you've been in the medieval sections of some European cities--or a few small districts of New York and Boston--you have an idea of what the City of Light was like before Baron Haussmann came along.

In re-doing Paris' streets, he also made them wider.  While they still seem charmingly or claustrophobically narrow, depending on your point of view, compared to American thoroughfares, the newly-made streets were still a good bit wider.  They allowed for Paris' new infrastructure, including sewers and the very thing that gave the city its nicknames:  gas-powered streetlights. 

While most people agree that widening and straightening the streets modernized the city and made it more habitable for many people, others accused Haussmann of being a tool of the powers-that-be.  Up to that time, Parisians were noted for insurrecting on the drop of a chapeau, and instigators who knew the streets could evade soldiers and guardsmen, who often came from other parts of the country and therefore weren't familiar with the twists and turns of those byways.  But the new, arrow-straight streets made pursuits easier because, well, they made it easier to keep perpetrators in their pursuers' sights.

I mention all of this because, while I hope (and assume, dear reader) that you will never steal a bike, I can offer this bit of advice:  If you try to make your escape on wheels you wrested from their rightful owners, don't try to make your escape on a road that stretches straight ahead of you for miles and miles (or kilometers and kilometers).

And, especially, don't try to make your getaway on an Interstate highway.  It will almost certainly result in your getting caught and hurt, or worse.

A 31-year-old man in Seattle learned that lesson the hard way.  At around 7pm on Wednesday, a bicycle was reported stolen on NE 45th Street near Interstate 5. Police were alerted and Washington State Troopers stopped him on the highway.  When he fought, they tasered him.  He ended up in a local hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.

It will be interesting, to say the least, to find out more about this alleged thief--and what prompted him to try to get away on the main north-south highway of the US West Coast.

Why Does One Steal For Three?

 I've been told, by people who have worked in it, that the art business can be as shady as any other.  Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised:  It's a world of secrecy with very little regulation.  And, as with real estate, stocks or anything else that's bought and sold, paintings, sculptures and other created objects sell for, essentially, whatever people are willing to pay for them, which leads to all sorts of unethical behavior.

Still, I have trouble imaging that anyone has ever said, with a straight face, "Psst!  Wanna buy a Monet?"  I don't know whether I'd laugh or call the police if I were to hear that.

That is the reason why I don't understand art theft--or theft of anything but basic necessities, and then only by desperate, destitute people. (Mind you, I don't condone any sort of pilferage:  I simply can better understand the motives of a person who's simply trying to survive or feed his or her family.)  After all, what do you do with Rembrandt's Storm on the Sea of Galilee? Or Van Gogh's Poppy Flowers? Or Cezanne's Boy In A Red Vest?  Hang them on your wall and invite your friends over for dinner?  I mean, if you were to try to sell those paintings to anyone who recognized them, they'd know that it was fake or stolen.  You can't make it "go stealth" the way you can with, say, a contraband high-end watch.

So it is with unusual bicycles.  Most bike thieves want to sell the bikes or their parts, so they steal stuff that's valuable but common. (That makes even more sense when you realize that for several years running, the most-stolen car was the Toyota Camry.)  I would think that it's more difficult to unload a tandem, especially a high-end one.  And I would expect that a bicycle built for three (which was misidentified as a tandem in the article in which I learned about its theft) would be even trickier to sell, "chop shop" or simply disappear. How many triplet fames have you seen?

The Rumseys.  Courtesy: Salt Lake City Police Department

Fortunately for the Rumsey family of Houston, it didn't take long for their three-seater to be recovered after it was stolen in Salt Lake City.  They commissioned the bike 18 years old, not only so Dave and Merle could pedal with Ford, their 36-year-old son with Down's Syndrome, but also so it could travel with them.  The bike can be disassembled to fit into a suitcase and has therefore accompanied the family on every trip they've taken.

So, as you can imagine, the bike entwines all sorts of memories with its usefulness to the family.  That is the reason why they were so glad it was returned to them.  And perhaps it was a good thing that the bike is unlike almost any other.  The Salt Lake Police didn't say whether they'd caught the thief. If they hadn't, perhaps he realized it would be too difficult to sell or otherwise unload and abandoned it. What would he have done with a Picasso or a Caravaggio?

How Not To Sell A Stolen Bike

When I wrote for a newspaper, I talked with a man who was (or at least claimed to have been) a "professional thief."  In other words, he said, stealing--jewels, mainly-- was his metier. And, as such, he and others like him had a set of guidelines--a code of professional conduct, if you will.  They included such gems as "Never kill unless there is no other alternative" and "Never steal from anyone poorer than yourself."

One thing that separates professionals, like the one he claimed to be, and others is that he stole strictly to "get paid," he said.  "You steal, you sell, you spend," he explained, unlike amateurs who might, say, steal out of poverty and desperation or to support a drug habit.

By implication, that meant "you shouldn't steal to support your stealing"  and "you shouldn't use something stolen to steal." In other words, a professional thief never  should do what two men in Oregon seem to have done.

A bicycle was stolen in Eugene, the state's capital.  The victim found it for sale on Facebook Marketplace and arranged to meet the sellers at the Walmart in nearby Springfield.  He apprised the cops of what he was doing.

Just before the gendarmes arrived, one of the sellers, who drove the car used to transport the bike, went into the store.  The officers, seeing the bike in the back seat, took the passenger--35-year-old Guy Devault--into custody on a warrant.  Shortly afterward, they caught the driver--Juan Sanchez, also 35 years old--in the store.

An investigation concluded that Devault was responsible for the stolen bike. But, as it turned out, the car was also stolen.  So, in addition to his outstanding warrant on for kidnapping, Sanchez now also faces a charge of being in possession of a stolen vehicle:  the car used to transport the bike.

The fellow I talked to when I was writing for a newspaper would have known better than that.

  

Losing Her Child

"Like a mother who lost her child."

I am sure many of you would feel that way if your bicycle went missing.  Whether the bike is a means of everyday transportation or has transported you across a continent, you are probably as protective of it as a parent of his or her progeny.

Patricia McNeil, a stroke survivor who lives in the Florida Panhandle, certainly is feeling such a loss.  Her black Trek took her across the country twice and served as her sole means of transportation.  In Florida, the latter is really saying something and is one reason why she logged over 40,000 miles on it in two years.



She left her machine in the foyer of a local Target. It's not the first time she parked her bike there and whenever she left the store, she retrieved her bike--until last Wednesday, that is.

Security footage confirmed that the bike was indeed stolen--by a local male who "looks like actor Paul Walker" and has a sleeve tatoo on his left arm.  It sounds to me that he knew about McNeil and her bike and the theft was a crime of opportunity.

Anyway, I hope he is apprenhended and Ms. McNeil gets her bike back.  Nobody deserves to lose her child.

Who Can Go Lower?

Stealing someone's bike is one of the lowest things one human being can do to another.

All right, I'll confess:  I'm not the first person to say as much.  Tom Cuthbertson said it in Anybody's Bike Book, warning that bike locks are only but so effective in deterring theft.

Now, one of the lowest things anybody has said, at least in recent history, was uttered by Donald Trump. (Are you surprised?) He claimed that there wasn't really a shortage of masks.  Rather, he claimed, they were going "out the back door."

Although I am not a health-care worker, I took umbrage to that remark because some of my current and former students work in hospitals and nursing homes and a neighbor/friend of mine is a nurse in one of this city's major hospitals.  It's hard not to wonder when--or whether--I'll see or hear from them again.

Trump accusing them of theft is a bit like Lance Armstrong accusing another rider of "juicing."  Or a Kardashian castigating anybody for a lack of restraint.

How much lower can someone go?  


It looks like somebody has plumbed such depths.  I am talking about the lowlife who took Dan Harvey's bike.  

At 2 am GMT, he had just finished his nine-hour shift at Queen's Medical Centre in Nottingham, England.  He'd spent the night as he's spent previous nights:  treating COVID-19 patients in the hospital's intensive care unit.  

Dan Harvey, medic

He went to an area of the hospital where a staff ID is required for entry.  He expected to unlock his bike and "clear his head" as he pedaled home.

Instead, he had to take a taxi:  His bike was gone. And his wasn't the first stolen from that limited-access area.

The ray of light in this darkness came after Harvey shared his loss on social media.  Soon, offers to replace his wheels came in.  

Dan Harvey, cyclist

He's riding to work again.  But it doesn't make stealing a bike from someone who rides it to a job where he puts his life on the line for others any less base of an act.

When Is A Bicycle "Irrelevant"?

I was intrigued by the headline:  Woman Flees Police On Irrelevant Bicycle.

It got me to wondering:  What, exactly, is an irrelevant bicycle?  Is it one that can't be ridden anymore?  Or is "Irrelevant" a brand?  (Now that would be terrible marketing!)

Turns out, said velocipede matched the description of one that was stolen in Hilo, Hawaii.  That is why cops pursued its rider--29-year-old Maria Duquette.  I probably would have believed, as they did, that she stole the bike, which she used to lead the gendarmes in a wild chase through Hilo Town to the Hilo Bay Front.  There, she ditched the wheels and jumped into the water.  

She swam, and cops lost sight of her.  A helicopter and boat search didn't yield any sign of her.  Later, though, someone saw her on Coconut Island.  She tried, again, to swim away, but officers pursued her into the ocean and took her into custody.  She was charged with traffic violations related to the chase and disobeying an officer's direction.

So they got their perp.  But, as it turned out, the bicycle wasn't the one that was reported stolen.  I guess that's what the headline writer meant by "irrelevant"--to the investigation.

As some of you might know, newspaper headlines are almost never written by the person who wrote the article.  I am sure that such was the case for the story and title I've linked.  I feel sorry for whoever wrote the article:  When I wrote for a newspaper, a few of my articles bore titles (not written by me, of course!) that were silly or even irrelevant.

A Cycle Of Karma?

One of the most depressing things that can happen to us is the theft of our bikes.

Just as dispiriting as the loss of something we love and depend on is the realization that we probably won't see it again and, it seems, nobody who isn't a cyclist cares.  We report our losses to the police and other authorities and they tell us that we're not likely to get our wheels back--which is another way of saying they have other fish to fry.

Perhaps the best most cyclists can hope for is what Amanda Needham experienced.

The Brooklyn resident's bike, which she rode to work, was stolen from the front of her house on 3 March. After finding empty space where her machine had been, she took some cardboard and yellow paint to make a sign she would post in that spot.

It begins, "To the person who stole my bike:  I hope you need it more than me."  She follows with a lament about how she depended on it and what it cost her.  "Next time, steal. Or not steal," is how her plea ends.

That sign stood for five days before she heard a knock at her door. She thought it was a delivery. Indeed, it was, but not one she was expecting:  a stranger bearing a used kid's bike with a flat tire.  

A few days later, she got another knock on her door.  This time, an older woman greeted her with a hug and told her if she found another bicycle, she'd bring it to her.  

Not surprisingly, Ms. Needham was touched. "These people were visibly poor and giving from what they had," she said.  But they didn't prepare her for what--or, more specifically, who--came by later.  Steven Powers, an antiques dealer, was riding by and saw her sign.  He posted a photo of it on Instagram and, just as he was thinking of offering to buy her sign--for $200, what she paid for the used bike-- another dealer in the UK offered to split the cost.  "That was the little push I needed," he said.

The sign, he said, is "graphically interesting."  But most important, he believed, is that her message "wasn't angry."

Needham used that $200 to buy another bike.  Before she did that, though, she took the kids' bike to Court Cycles, a local repair shop owned by mechanic Ms. JoAnne Nicolosi.  She offered to repair the bike for free, and Amanda offered to set up her shop on social media.  They now plan to raffle the machine, dubbed #karmacycle, for free later this month.

While she isn't glad she lost her bike, Ms. Needham is happy to have met the people she's met.  Most important, though, is not that she lost her wheels or "got a secondhand bike for someone else."  Rather, she says, she just wants people to "remember that those tiny acts can really go a long way."

Reunited, Two Years Later

In some earlier posts, I bemoaned the fact that stolen bicycles are almost never returned to their rightful owners.  In most cities, if someone takes your bike, you have less than a two percent chance of ever seeing it again.

Since I don't want this blog to turn into a repository of lamentable statistics and depressing stories, I try to draw attention to the outliers and happy endings, whenever I hear about them.

Trevor Pryor

Two years ago, Trevor Pryor was working for Arizona State University in Tempe.  He propped his machine in a hallway for "only a few seconds" while he said good-bye to some co-workers.

Well, "a few seconds" is all a thief needs.  "I turned around and the bike is gone," Pryor recalls.  He checked online marketplaces like Offerup.com and Letgo.com, but found "no real leads."  

His bike

He despaired of ever seeing his bike--"my first  bike I bought with my own money", he explained--again.  That is, until last week, when a friend noticed the bike on the Facebook page of the Bicycle Recovery Action Team (BRAT:  what an acronym!), a group of vigilantes that keeps an eye out for stolen bikes.  

The friend set up a meeting to look at it .  Pryor, accompanied by an ASU police officer, went to a warehouse full of bikes in Tempe.  There, a man wheeled the bike out and the officer intervened.  "Did you know that bike is stolen?," he asked.

The man's boss claimed he bought the bike at a pawnshop and offered to sell it to Pryor for $100 because he "didn't want to take a loss."
 

Reporters who followed this story went back to that warehouse the other day.  It was full of bikes, but there were no people there.

At least Pryor has his bike back.  Hopefully, other bikes in that warehouse will end up with their rightful owners.

When It's Gone In Tucson: You Have A 3 Percent Chance

I feel like somebody broke my leg.

Tucson, Arizona resident Leif Abrell voiced what many of us felt when a bicycle was stolen from us.  He lost his custom-made mountain bike in the wee hours of 28 September.  Like most bike-theft victims, he didn't see that his trusty steed was gone until it was too late:  A noise woke him and he noticed the door to his carport was open.  He checked to see whether anything valuable was missing, but in his groggy state, it didn't occur to him to look in the dining room of his midtown home.  When he did, he saw that his treasured bike was missing.  And he found a much-inferior bike deserted on the side of the street next to his house.

The rest of his story is also all-too-familiar to those of us who've had our wheels whisked away:  He reported his loss to the police.  While he "didn't have high hopes" for recovering his bike, he clung to "some hopes that something would happen," he recounted.  Alas, "nothing really happened," he said.

I learned of Abrell's ordeal from an article on Tucson.com.  According to that same article, 1200 bike thefts have been reported to police in "The Old Pueblo".  Only about three percent of those cases ended in arrests of suspected thieves and, worse, there's really how many stolen bikes are returned to their rightful owners.  As in most cities, the police don't track that.

Perhaps most disheartening of all, 63 percent of this year's bike theft cases were marked as "cleared", meaning they reached some sort of conclusion. Why is that disheartening?  Well, most of those cases were closed because there wasn't enough evidence to continue an investigation.  

Everything I've mentioned confirms something known to most of us who have had bikes stole:  Once it's gone, you'll probably never see it again.

Chris Hawkins, a Tucson police spokesman, echoed a common refrain in explaining why it's so difficult to track stolen bicycles:  In most places, "bicycles don't need to be registered like vehicles."  And, he says, bicycle owners rarely record serial numbers, which can be entered into databases for access by owners of second-hand shops and other establishments where stolen bikes might end up. 

The lack of such records, Hawkins says, is one reason why, even when bikes are retrieved by cops and find their way to the evidence room, they are seldom re-united with their owners.  

While Hawkins makes good points, the cynic in me (I am a New Yorker, after all) wonders whether some police departments would actively pursue bike a bike theft even if they had serial numbers and other records.  While some officers, like some people in other professions and jobs, simply don't care, others are simply overwhelmed by competing priorities and directives. 

Sometimes I think one has the best hope of getting a stolen bike back if a shop owner or mechanic recognizes it--or if its owner encounters it on the street.

How A Stolen Bike Became The Gift That Gave Back

By now you know that I have a soft spot for people who, in whatever ways, bring bikes to kids who couldn't otherwise afford them.

Most of the stories I've posted so far are about individuals or organizations who restore old bikes that might otherwise have ended up in a landfill.   Some started out as one-person operations and mushroomed into local non-profit organizations.

Well, today I'm going to tell you about a kid who gave his bike to another kid, and whose family helped out that other kid's family at the holidays.  And there's a particularly interesting "twist" to this story.

Fifty years ago, on Christmas Eve 1967, 18-year-old William Lynn Weaver was walking around in his neighborhood, the Mechanicsville area of Knoxville, Tennessee.  He saw another boy gliding down the street on a bike.  "Boy, that looks like my brother's bike," he thought.

When he got home, he asked his younger brother Wayne whether he knew where his bicycle was.  "It's down on the steps," he replied.  Except that it wasn't.

William Lynn Weaver with his brother in 1963.

Well, Mr. Weaver tracked down the kid who took his brother's bike--to an unlit shack in an alley--and planned to confront the kid.  But his father, who accompanied him, told him,"Just shut up and let me talk."

He knocked on the door.  An elderly man answered.  Inside, the shack was cold and dark, with only a single candle for light.  It turned out that the thief was indeed the old man's grandson.

He and William took the bike and walked home.

The father told the mother, who was cutting a turkey, about the incident.  She said nothing, but packed up some of the food.  Then "my father went to the coal yard and got a bag of coal," William recalls.  Then his father looked at his brother and said, "You've got another bike, don't you?"  The brother nodded, and the three of them returned to the shack with the food, coal and bike.  

The father handed over $20--not an inconsiderable sum in those days--and said, "Merry Christmas."  The man broke down in tears.

William Lynn Weaver today.

As William explains, his family wasn't as badly-off as the boy and man who lived in the shack, but they didn't have much, either.  "My father was a chauffeur, and my mother was a domestic," he explained.  "That Christmas, I don't remember what gift I got, but I do know that [giving to the boy and his grandfather] made me feel better than any Christmas I've ever had."

Ah, the power of a bike...

Make Sure The Swap Is Consensual!

Many of you have been to "swap meets."  I've gone to a couple myself.  I went with the intent of trading stuff I didn't want or need anymore, but the real fun was meeting some of the people and seeing rare bikes, parts and accessories, some of which haven't been made in a long time.

If you ever decide to go to a swap meet, I have some advice:  Make sure that the owner of whatever you get in the swap knows that you're getting his or her stuff.

At least, that's the advice I would give to a fellow in New Orleans who traded his bike for someone else's.  

Details of the transaction, if you will, go like this:  He parked his bike on the 1400 block of Washington Avenue, an area that normally sees a lot of foot and bicycle traffic.   After parking his bike, he walked away from the area but turned around for a moment and seemed to survey the area before continuing on his way.

A little later, he returned.  But instead of getting on the bike he parked, he removed the lock on someone else's bike and rode it away.

Police are looking for the man.  They also are, no doubt, trying to find out whether the bike he rode to the "swap" was acquired in a similar fashion.

Not Too Famous For That

How many of you remember Paris Hilton?

I confess:  When she was in the spotlight, I didn't pay attention to her.  That is, until she was arrested for DUI.  It wasn't her arrest that made me take notice.  Rather, it was something she said not long afterward:  "I'm too pretty for prison."

Well, she did get prison time for violating her probation agreement.  That, as I recall, was about a decade ago--around the time Kim Kardashian-this generation's Paris Hilton-- was becoming, well, Kim Kardashian.

So, if Paris Hilton was indeed not "too pretty for prison", then is anyone too rich/famous/talented/beloved or fill-in-the-blank to have his or her bicycle stolen?

Well, it seems that at least one professional athlete's stature didn't keep him from losing his bike.  As a 20-year-old rookie who is currently sidelined with an injury, he's not one of the better-known players in his sport.  However, he is something of a celebrity in the city that is home to his team, for that team, and the sport they play, play large roles in that city's life and identity.

That city is Pittsburgh, and the team is the Steelers of American football.  

JuJu Smith-Schuster, a receiver, rode his Ghost bicycle to the team's practices.  After reporting it missing on Tuesday, he posted a message about it on social media.  "Why people got to be like that?" he wondered.  

He didn't have to wait long to get it back.  That night--Tuesday--a man called from a bar in nearby Mount Oliver after realizing, from a TV news item, that the bike he'd purchased earlier in the day was indeed Smith-Schuster's bike.  The man turned the bike over to police, who turned it over to Smith-Schuster.

Interestingly, Smith-Schuster doesn't have a driver's license, although he says he plans to get one "before the weather gets cold."  He still needs to work on parallel parking, according to one of his teammates.

That wouldn't be a problem, would it, if he rode his bike to work?  All he needs to remember is that he's not too big or talented, and he will not be too famous, to lose his bike.

Another Mixte In The Mix

Today's post won't be about Max, or any other cat.

It'll be about a bike.  Specifically, it'll be news about one of my own bikes--as if I haven't given you enough lately.

This item, though, has nothing to do with any of the bikes on the side-bar of this blog.  It has to do with my commuter "beast" bike that almost never enters my apartment.

For three years, that bike was a '70's Schwinn LeTour.  It was one of those rare bikes made in a woman's version big enough to fit (more or less, anyway) someone my height.  

(Funny that when I lived a man, I was of average height.  Now, as a woman, I am taller than about 90 percent of my sisters!)

Well, that bike was stolen.  That is one of the reasons, of course, to have a "beater" bike:  Losing it doesn't hurt as much as having a nicer bike disappear.  You buy such bikes cheaply and spend as little as necessary to make it do whatever you need it to do.  And, if you lose that bike, you repeat the process.

Anyway, I went to a few sidewalk and yard sales and checked Craigslist, where I found this:

From the information I've gleaned, Fuji made this Allegro during its 1986 model year.  The frame is constructed from "Valite" tubing.  How or whether it differs from the carbon steel Fuji and other manufacturers used on their cheaper models, I don't know--or care.  I must say, though, that the bike does feel livelier than the LeTour.  That may be a function of its geometery, which seems a bit tighter.  If nothing else, the wheelbase is shorter.

And, interestingly, this bike has SunTour dropouts with the "ear" for mounting a derailleur.  They actually look like the SunTour dropouts on my Trek 412, except for an additional set of eyelets:  a handy feature, as I've mounted a rack and fenders on the bike.

Originally, the bike had 12 speeds shifted with steel SunTour derailleurs and stem shifters.  As you can see, I took those off and turned the bike into a single speed.  The derailleurs were still operable, but the chain, freewheel and cables were rusted.  So were the springs and all of the other brake hardware.   In any event, I gave the derailleurs, brakes and some other stuff--including the flat-ish bars and brake levers that came with the bike--to Recycle a Bicycle.  And I replaced the brakes with a pair of Raleigh-branded Dia Compe centerpulls I had lying around.

If you read this blog regularly, you won't be surprised to see that I installed Velo Orange Porteur handlebars and bar-end brake levers.  I don't like the hand position on most flat bars:  The grip area of the Porteurs allows me to keep my hands in a position something like that of the ramp and brake lever hood area on the handlebars of my road bikes.  The Porteurs also allow me to use a stem with a slightly longer extension, which improves handling.

So far, this bike is working well as my daily commuter.  And, yes, it's a twin-tube mixte, so I feel at least like I'm riding with some style.  And isn't that what really counts? ;-)

Why Do Most Bike Thieves Get Away With It?

In today's Los Angeles Times, an editorial writer asked the question on the minds of many cyclists:

"Why are cities allowing bicycle theft to go virtually unpunished?"

The editorial points out something that most of us already know:  Bike theft simply isn't a high priority, if it's a priority at all, for most police departments.  There are a variety of reasons, valid or not, for this.  One is that police tend to concentrate on high-profile, high-value crimes.  So a stolen Maserati gets more attention than a missing Masi, possibly because insurance companies and lawyers are likely to have similar priorities.  

Another reason might be one a police officer expressed to me:  "Well, if you have a good lock and insurance policy, you can replace your bike."  This is true, up to a point:  Most policies--whether from lock makers or insurance companies, have deductibles.  But, even if a bike's owner is reimbursed for its full value, he or she may not be able to replace the stolen bike with another like it, especially if it is a custom or discontinued model. 

Even if a cyclist is reimbursed for the full price he or she paid for the bike, that amount of money probably won't buy as good a bike as the one that was taken, especially if the bike is more than a couple of years old.   And, of course, the deductibles and depreciation mean that the cyclist is likely to get considerably less than he or she paid for the bike.

From Priceconomics

What that means is that the newly-bikeless rider will buy a lower-quality bike than the one that was stolen--that is, if he or she buys another bike at all.  The LA Times editorial points out that according to one study, 7 percent of bike-theft victims in Montreal never replace their bikes.

The article makes a point that for many cyclists (such as yours truly), not having a bike is not merely an inconvenience.  An increasing number of people, mainly in cities, are depending on their bikes for everyday transportation.   Most of us aren't rich:  According to a Federal government survey cited in the editorial, the people most likely to cycle (or, for that matter, walk) to work, school or errands--or simply to get around--are those with household incomes of less than $10,000 a year.  That group of people is likely to include, in addition to low-wage workers, the unemployed, retirees and students.  

Also in that group  are many who make their livings on their bicycles.  For a year, I was one.  In nearly every city--and in some suburban and even rural areas--there is an army of folks who deliver everything from documents to dim sum on their wheels.  For them, losing their bikes is catastrophic.

And they, as often as not, are the least able to afford to buy another bike of any kind.  In much the same way that Kim Kardashian being robbed of 10 million dollars' worth of jewelry is not going to affect her lifestyle as much as the average person is affected by losing the watch he or she wears every day, the guy (or woman) who loses a Porsche can more easily afford to replace it than the delivery person who purchased a Peugeot U-08 from a tag sale.

That, I believe, might be the most important "take away" from that L.A. Times editorial.  It may be that law enforcement authorities still see bicyclists losing their bikes as kids losing their toys but someone whose luxury sports car is stolen as the victim of a "real" crime.  Unless that changes, bike theft will be a mostly-unsolved crime and bike thefts will continue to be under-reported.

Just Bring Her Bike Back

Stealing a bike from anybody is bad enough.  But stealing it from an 11-year-old girl takes a particular kind of depravity.

Whenever I hear about someone stealing, I want to believe--or at least hope--that the thief was desperate.  There is,  however, no room for such hope when the thief steals a bike that is way too small for him, or any other person over the age of 14, to ride:  Small-wheeled bikes for young children have very little, if any, resale value.  

Still, those bikes mean everything to the kids who ride them.  "I learned how to ride a bike on it,"  Brianna Jiminez recalled, as tears streamed down her face.  She has "lots of memories" on it, she said.



At least there is some chance the the thief will be caught:  His image was captured on a surveillance video from her family's front porch, where he took her bike.  The bike burglar also took wallets, purses, jewelry and other items from the Jiminez's neighbors in Houston.

Her father, Pablo isn't "looking for trouble".  All he wants is for the thief to "get the items back."  He won't press charges and has this message for the crook:  "If you need somebody in your life, let me help out."