Bend and Recover

A quick glance at the regular news about bikes that turns up every day reveals that there are only a few broad themes. One is sport cycling - the race reports and events of the world - another is clearly the ongoing battle between road users, where drivers blame cyclists for riding badly and cyclists moan about drivers killing them all over the roads. Mixed in are the innovations, useful or otherwise, in cycle technology and the discussions of bike fashion, but almost the most common of all involve something to do with bike theft.

As a reflection we often talk about theft as well and today is no different. The ways of fighting theft fall into two broad camps. You can either stop your bike being nicked in the first place, or make sure you recover it once it has been stolen. Having built up this far, it would be a shame if we weren’t about to bring you examples of both.

Don’t worry. We are.

Kevin Scott has developed a bike that can be literally bent around a pole to stop it getting stolen. The idea was that you can lock all the parts of the bike with one lock and so reduce the need for extra cables and locks to keep both wheels safe, although it also means you can fold your bike up to fit it in a small space, or, I guess, to pack it for transporting. I imagine it’s this use that will ultimately be the biggest draw as taking an extra cable along with your lock seems more flexible in many ways than flaccidising your bike every time you want to leave it.

The other option is to find your bike once it has been stolen. One of the neatest solutions for this is a new website that keeps a track of all the bikes being listed on eBay or Gumtree. Bikeshd.co.uk might be handy if you were looking for something particular in the line of a second-hand bike, or it could help you find your bike as soon as it turns up on the internet. It won’t help you if it ends up in Brick Lane, but it still sounds like a simple solution (with a lot of complicated computer stuff in the background, I’m sure) to trawling through the ads until you find your lost bike.

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