Big Brother is Watching Your Bike
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 09.12.07
TreeHugger promotes bicycling as the best way to get around, but a big disincentive is the high rate of bicycle theft. The University of Toronto provides particularly rich pickings. Last year the U of T police cut the rate significantly by hiding GPS beacons on high end bikes and tracking them as they were stolen; six arrests have been made as a result. According to the Varsity, "Using cell phone towers and satellites, police track the position and speed of the bike on a computer, or even a Blackberry PDA. When someone steals the bike, police home in on it and arrest the would-be thief."
This year, they are giving out "this bike could be a bait bike...Do you really want to take that chance?" stickers for students to put on their bikes, to make thieves think twice, or perhaps let new inexperienced thieves learn about the program. That's a lot cheaper than a $ 1,400 GPS beacon. ::Biking Toronto
Wouldn't the sticker tag the bike as NOT being a bait bike? I mean they wouldn't put a GPS beacon into a bike with one of those stickers because they want the bait bikes to be stolen. Seems like the sticker idea would backfire.... read between the lines and the sticker might as well say "this bike is only protected by a sticker... should be safe to steal."
yes! arrest those scumbags. There are few things smaller than a bike thief!
That's the thing that pisses me off the most about Toronto is the number of bike thefts. Friends of mine, and myself have all had bikes stolen, not from using dinky locks, but heavy duty $60 locks too. I'm glad someone is finally taking an initiative to keep our bikes safe because the police don't care.