Is posting a stolen bike to Craigslist the only recourse for bike theft victims? If so then it is clear that Philadelphia needs to do more reduce bike theft and recover bicycles.
We would like to hear your ideas on tackling this problem. In the meantime check out http://mystolenbianchi.blogspot.com/ in which a Philadelphia woman posted a great tutorial on how to recover a stolen bike.
This is the legacy blog of the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia. It is an archive of posts from 2003 to 2014. Making your ride better since 1972. https://www.bicyclecoalition.org
1 comments:
First off, I know many police departments have a form to register bicycle serial numbers in the event the bicycle is recovered from a cache of stolen bikes. My understanding was there was an electronic database for this, but I can't confirm this. My college police department did this; Lower Merion Township police do this, and Philadelphia Police do this:
http://www.ppdonline.org/cmty/cmty_bike.php
Perhaps this program should be better communicated, or perhaps bike stores should offer to collect these forms from their customers at point of original sale, or offer to fill out on behalf of customers.
Now, that having been said, I'm kind of mystified at the tone of the blog post: craigslist is an ingenious way utilize free, crowdsourcing resources of "Web 2.0" to announce to the select group of people (in the market for cheap bikes) who are most likely to take a critical look at a selection of used or inexpensive bicycles to be on alert that specific bicycles are stolen goods, and be able to easily and anonymously reply if the bicycle is seen. I can't think of a government program that could do better than this by design.
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