Research and Systems

I ran around town today and spoke to quite a few people about bike theft in Savannah. The police didn't have a lot of "readily available" information and made me run around a lot, calling people at various departments, none of which were there cause it was Friday...but plenty of leads to pursue come Monday... the "Property Room" and it's detectives and sergeants as well as the assigned bike investigators.

I contacted SCAD security and spoke to a few people that were good resources and also pointed me in strong directions. SCAD's procedure for stolen bikes goes like this:
I spent a good two hours at the new bike shop in town first gathering information, then because I got a flat tire right after I left and I had to go back and buy a patch kit.
The guys at the store relayed lots of opinions about the state of bicycle theft and what can be done about it. On registering bikes with the police or national registry one told me "It's all fruitless," because most bikes are chopped, resold, auctioned or shipped out of the area. Most agreed that in Savannah however, you can usually recover a bike because it was taken on a whim by an impoverished person and is probably being ridden around by them or someone similar.
"The worst thing you can do is lock up overnight." This is a common consensus among the shop workers who also agree that lack of proper locking and even more so, education on how to lock a bike, are the main causes of bike theft in Savannah.
Although the downtown shop takes in donated and refurbished bikes they claim to have not been offered a stolen bike since their opening a month ago. In the past they have called the police as soon as they sense the bike being offered was stolen, an event happened to everyone in the shop.

One of the results of all this was an idea for a system that may address some of these issues. I got pretty excited about it's potential but I realize it's only one idea and it's pretty complicated. RFIDs are not the answer, but this is a step in the direction of system design that could change (or positively affect) how people lock up and think about bikes.


More details on this idea at flicker.