Thursday, August 12, 2010

Reverse engineered bike theft solutions

I just started giving this some thought, so this post will be mostly brainstorming.

My personal feeling is that storage lockers are not a viable option is a space like downtown Toronto. Space constraints, economic scale, suceptibility to vandalism and even general effectiveness (I saw a forum post where a plastic locker was torched open and an expensive bike stolen) are all working against this concept, and I do not think it has legs, especially if bike traffic increases.

So what? It is easy enough to bash an idea without contributing anything new to the conversation. How about approaching the problem from a different angle. Instead of trying to hide the bike away from plain sight but putting it in a location that is still painfully conspicuous both to theives and the general public, why don't we go about making the thieves' lives more difficult? Maybe the level of difficulty only has to go up a notch in a certain aspect in order to cease being worthwhile for the theif. How can we make their 'job' more difficult?

-Make them more conspicuous
-Increase need for larger/more powerful tools
-Decrease ease of escape
-Decrease access to bike parts with tooling (ability to strip parts)

also:

-Build with as few moving parts as possible (ongoing maintenance concerns)
-Build with as much steel and concrete as possible
-Design to keep bikes orderly
-Design to be visually stimulating

I am going to go search google images now and make sure nobody is already building what I have in my head.

1st edit ALSO: Space efficient (at least as much as the locker, ideally far more so), and I just checked out the Toronto locker program and it requires a whole bunch of BS that basically makes it useless. (see for yourself)


OLD: http://www.transalt.org/files/newsroom/magazine/024Fall/06pennstation.html

http://www.bikeup.com/

http://www.cycle-safe.com/RenderTable.aspx

http://www.dobradesign.com/exterior.php

http://norstadbikeracks.com/

pretty much all crap, having a hard time finding anything cool, send me links if you have them!