The answer is to have a shitty bike with a good lock, been using a $200 beater for 4 years and it still got everything except the saddle got stolen once
In my experience it's mostly a matter of not having the most desirable bike or the shittiest lock. Put a $100 u-lock on a $300 bike, and you can almost be assured that you'll have neither. Put a nice enough lock on yours, and you can be pretty sure you won't have the most easily stolen bike either.
At least in the US, road bikes are pretty much immune to being stolen because they're seen as terminally uncool by the lay population. Would I leave a $5000 road bike locked up at a subway station? Not likely, but I'm not fast enough to justify owning one anyways. $2000, yeah probably, as long as I'm not leaving it there daily.
Anecdotally, police won't do shit to recover a stolen bike in the US. Having some kind of tracker is only going to help you once it's already been stolen. I'd focus my efforts on preventing the theft in the first place.
I've had three bikes stolen in about three months time. Each time, I used what was considered a high-end lock. I was usually more bummed out at losing the lock because they cost me more than the bike.
The best strategy, I find, is to avoid leaving the bike in theft 'hot spots', especially in the weekend. If that can't be avoided, make sure to put the bike behind another bike, preferable a fancy one or one with a shitty lock.
Crappy ones don't get stolen. I lived in an area with rampant bike theft, had 3 bikes stolen, and bought a crappy bike. I didn't even bother locking it most of the time. I sold it when I moved, after 2 years of pretty much daily use.
Having biked in urban environments for quite some time, I've found the solution is is to have a crappy bike and a bigger lock than the next bike over. Note that a crappy bike doesn't have to be a bad bike, just not something flashy.
I've even heard of cases where a carbon bike frame (itself worth thousands) was cut so the parts could be stolen. But you're right, the solution is a beater bike with a big lock, and if you have a nice bike, keep it indoors and never leave it unattended for more than an hour.
Bike locks are generally irrelevant. If people can't steal the entire bike (which they usually can despite the lock) they can take off most of the parts - the tires, saddle, handlebars etc (whatever you have not wrapped in a lock).
I have a shitty bike that I bought for 150 € ten years ago. It creaks everywhere, is hard to ride, and a thief once actually moved it out of the way to steal the bike behind it.
I use it every day but I'm not going to get a better one, because I don't want to be constantly worried that someone will steal it. I want to use it as transportation, leave it wherever, and know that it will still be there because it's not worth stealing.
Plus, being hard to ride means I get extra exercise for my fixed-length rides.
Locks are only good for keeping honest people honest.
Over a quarter century of bicycle commuting I've had 7 bikes stolen, and it cost me about $20k less than if I had been relying on public transport, the next cheapest option.
In my experience it's mostly a matter of not having the most desirable bike or the shittiest lock.
Right, in The Netherlands, where there are a lot of bikes, this is the basic rule: just make sure that there are other bikes that are more attractive to steal, even if it's a new bike. The second basic rule is: use a chain lock to attach your bike frame to an unmovable object, so that a thief cannot just throw your bike in a van and remove the locks elsewhere.
What I do:
- Use a ring lock for the back wheel. Makes it unattractive to steal just the wheel. The lock needs to be unscrewed from the frame to remove the wheel.
- Use a chain lock and make it go through the frame, front wheel, and attach it to an unmovable object. In order to steal the frame, the thief would have to saw through the chain in plain sight.
- If there is no supervised parking, park the bike in an area where there are enough people where someone will notice a thief trying to break the locks.
- Get bike insurance. It's usually only 10 Euro per month and if your bike gets stolen, you get back the bike's value.
- Some insurers also install a tracker. This has double value: bikes with a tracker are less attractive to steal. Secondly, bikes with a tracker are usually moved to a 'cool-off' location first. This is usually just some place removed a few streets from where the bike was stolen. If it's still there after a few days, the thieves know that nobody is actively tracking the bike and they can take it somewhere to comfortably break the lock. So, it's likely that the insurer will find the bike at the cool-off location without much damage.
My ebike was stolen. It had a good lock, and was on street with significant passersby. It seemed like there was nothing I could do to prevent that from happening again.
My solution was to buy a foldable bike that was half the price, and half the weight of my ebike.
I didn't even buy a bike lock because I never leave the foldable bike parked on the street. Wherever I go I bring it inside.
This really is the key. Make it not worth the effort to go for your bike. Your A->B bike needs to be just capable enough to get you from A to B. Have a secondary cool bike for racing / weekends, if you're into biking.
My current commuter bike that I got after having one stolen is a beater, and the lock that's on it cost me more than the bike. Sure, it's not the greatest to ride, but I can leave it locked to the closest lamp post next to wherever I need to go, and not worry a single bit.
Also, I like to think that the big, shiny registration sticker helps persuade would be thieves not to bother. Where I live, bike registration costs just couple EUR, but judging from the absence of stickers in bike racks, hardly anyone does it.
Even a beater bike is no solution, I parked my old beater (a rusty old department store bike) at the train station, and still had the seat stolen. It was bolted on (no quick release), so whoever took it apparently had tools.
So I stopped riding to the station until I got a bike locker.
Another huge problem with bikes is that in my city your bike is basically public property. At any moment in time someone could just take it with no repercussions. No amount of locks it chains seems to be effective. So you don’t want to invest a lot of money into having one properly outfitted unless you have some place secure to store it on both ends
I remind myself that taking transit costs $1200/year. That's what the poor people who can't afford a nice bike do.
I don't come anywhere close to having a $1200 worth of bike stolen every year (I'm 45 and have had 7 bikes stolen in my life of commuting by bicycle).
I just lock the frame to whatever with a U-lock.
Once I had my seat stolen, and once someone made off with my pedals, and again, that isn't enough to warrant threading cables through all my components every time I lock up.
Bike thieves have no fear in most cities, even when it's a $500+ bike (that is, any bike not purchased at Walmart). That's not easy to replace for most people, even engineers. Locking up bike thieves is plenty productive.
In any major city really the solution is to never lock anything up in public that is worth more than $400 or so. I have two road bikes, the insurance replacement value of each would probably be $3000, and I wouldn't even dream of buying a lock. I literally don't even know where my lock is. The last time I saw a lock was when I put it in a box of stuff on a shelf in my garage 10+ years ago.
If you have a nice road bike with very clean tires people generally will not mind you bringing it into places with you consistently.
No matter how good your lock is, if somebody REALLY wants the bike (for the value of its components) they'll just saw the frame in half.
Nothing... you'd still want to lock this up to something. And at $600 for just the wheel that's increasing your chance of it being stolen as well, bikes get stolen far too often.
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