They Stole A Bike—And What Else?

 If you have ever had a bike stolen, bicycle thieves might seem like the most depraved individuals.

While pilfering Peugeots and Pogliaghis might be some crooks’ métier, others no doubt steal other things. This makes sense when you realize that many bike thefts are crimes of opportunity and the end-game is to sell the bike, whether whole in parts. The same could be said for the filching of other items like jewelry.

I have to wonder, however, about the two perps who entered, without permission, a New Orleans apartment complex on 18 July. They stole a bicycle—and a package containing the remains of a deceased person.

Surveillance images from NOPD

While I deplore stealing bikes, I can understand why thieves do it: Bicycles are relatively easy to swipe and sell. I cannot, on the other hand, comprehend a motive for taking someone’s remains. Could it be that the partners in crime took the package simply because it was there and didn’t realize what was inside? Or was there some more complicated motive that involved, say, revenge or simply harassment against a particular person?

Whatever the explanation may be, a bicycle and a package of human remains has to be one of the strangest combinations of theft I—and, possibly, the police officers investigating the case—have ever heard of.

Cyclists in The City Of Light

 During the Olympic Games, not all cyclists are on the track or trails, or on streets set aside for the road races and time trials. And they’re not all commuters: After all, Paris (and France) has a reputation for being “closed” in August, when residents leave for vacations in the countryside or abroad.

Rather, many of the cyclists along the Quai d’Orsay and other popular venues are visitors. Velib (the city’s bike share network) use is up 11 percent from last year in spite of bad weather. Much of that increase can be attributed to a 44 percent rise in temporary passes.

It’s difficult not to think that visitors are encouraged by the network of bike lanes that laces the City of Light and the auto-free zones created in other parts of the city.  Also, Velib has installed additional docking stations at the entrances to Olympic venues and other key locations.

Illustration by Logan Guo

The campaign to make Paris less car-congested and more bik-friendly began shortly after current mayor Anne Hidalgo was first elected ten years ago and was no doubt accelerated by planning for the Olympics. In contrast to American cities—like my hometown of New York—that have made efforts that are more sporadic and less organized—visitors and residents alike seem to enjoy the car-free spaces. I wonder whether the visitors be motivated by their memories of cycling the city—or simply enjoying coffee by the Champ de Mars or Rue de Rivoli—and help to make their hometowns more bike-friendly or simply more pleasant and sustainable. I just hope they won’t blame a new bike lane for “taking “ “their” parking spaces, as happens so often here in New York. 

French BMX

 In 2015, I wrote a post about Lyotard pedals.  The French manufacturer was best known for its Models 460–the alloy “rattrap” model popular with cyclo-cross riders and bike tourists and commuters—and the 23, a.k.a., Berthet, a platform pedal that inspired the MKS and White Industries Urban Platform pedals.  Many ‘70’s Bike Boom-era machines were equipped with other models like the 45 (an alloy quill pedal) and the 136R, which was more or less a steel version of the 460 and sometimes had built-in reflectors.

Nowhere in the brochures I could find—or in articles like the one on the Classic Lightweights website—did I find a reference to this:

I am guessing that like Lyotard’s clipless pedal, it wasn’t made for very long. 

Both the BMX and clipless models, as good as they may have been, seem to have been “last gasp” efforts to keep the company, which seems to have ceased trading in the late-1980s, afloat. Lyotard’s sales of its less-expensive pedals (like the steel ones I mentioned) tanked, even as original equipment to manufacturers, when cheaper imports became available. Then the market for its higher-end pedals (and those from other companies) all but disappeared once Look and Time made easy-to-use clipless pedals available around 1985.

That year was also around the peak of BMX’s popularity—and when the cycling world was starting to realize that mountain bikes weren’t “just a fad.” While Japanese companies made many of the early BMX- and mountain-bike-specific parts, and Campagnolo even offered full gruppos for a couple of years, French bike and component manufacturers were slow to enter the mountain bike world and hardly touched BMX at all.

So, it’s hard not to wonder (for me, anyway) whether Lyotard would still be with us—and, in fact, be the presence it once was—had they started to make pedals like the ones in the photos—and clipless pedals—sooner.