Two wheels

It's a steal

There's one big problem with the fact that more of us are getting around by bike: more of us are having them stolen. If the bicycle trade is booming, so too is the black market in nicked bikes. Figures out recently from insurer Direct Line suggest that a bike is stolen in the UK virtually every minute, totalling more than 400,000 thefts a year. Reliable figures are hard to come by, not least because police believe only about a quarter of thefts are reported. Previous estimates of the total figure have varied from 300,000 to half a million a year.

Besides the obvious distress, there are many depressing aspects to this modern curse of velo-kleptomania. One is that the police quote a recovery rate of a mere 5%. This is probably an overestimate: the clear-up rate has been documented, in some urban areas, to be as low as 2%. If you've ever had the experience of reporting a bike theft to the police, you will get the distinct impression that the only point was to get a crime number to authenticate your insurance claim.

Naturally, the acceleration of bicycle theft has also fuelled the number of claims and, consequently, the costs of premiums. It's reasonable to say that if you choose to insure your bike, you will have paid the full price of replacing it within about five years. A cheaper alternative is to rely on home-insurance cover, but these policies have a low cap on what you can claim and a high excess.

The hidden effect of bike theft is that it works as a significant disincentive: survey data show that two-thirds of people cycled less often, and nearly a quarter gave up altogether, after having a bike nicked. Part of this can be explained by the fact that more than half of cyclists do not have insurance, so individuals are taking the main hit of the estimated £35m annual cost of losses.

And this hides a huge trade in stolen goods. In London, I've occasionally heard of intrepid types getting up early on a Sunday morning to go to Brick Lane market and wrest their beloved machine back off a stall-holder. It would be easy to condemn unscrupulous market dealers, and even the police who seem to turn a blind eye to this "informal economy", but the truth is that if you've ever bought a second-hand bike, you've probably been the final link in the chain of a "fencing" operation.

Have I? Yes, I've bought a bike from a dodgy shop, which I knew was almost certainly stolen. What can you do? I asked for a receipt and got one. If I hadn't bought it, someone else would have. It's a form of crime that no one seems very interested in preventing.

Jenny Jones, green transport adviser to the London mayor, is an exception. She would like to run a different version of Direct Line's recent experiment of leaving locked bikes out and seeing how long they lasted (Croydon was worst in the UK; its decoy went within the hour). Jones wants to see "baited" bikes used, with tracking technology, so that some proper police work would be done on bike theft for a change.

It's an appealing idea, if only to see some justice dispensed. But it doesn't tackle the root of the problem - which is that the bicycle industry itself has conspicuously done diddly-squat. The trade does very nicely, thank you, by linking up with the insurance companies to replace stolen bikes. Compare and contrast this with the efforts of mobile phone and car companies to tackle the issue: car theft, in particular, has fallen markedly. Witness the fact that the UK's most stolen car now is the Vauxhall Belmont. That's like saying the most stolen bike is a 20-year-old Raleigh. If only. Safecote: see today's corrections column, page 34.

Bike doc

Dear Matt,

I ride roughly 40km per day and up some hilly terrain. Given that my chain gets grimy very easily, what is your opinion of chainless bikes (such as those made by Dynamic Bicycles) as an option?

Michael Gottlieb, Echenevex, France

Shaft-driven bicycles have been around as long as chain-driven ones but never caught on because the mechanism tends to be heavier and less efficient (90%, compared with 95%-97% for a clean chain). That said, Dynamic claims its bikes run at 94% efficiency - which would be better than your grimy derailleur. And another manufacturer, Incline, has made a shaft system only 0.25kg heavier than a chain.

These developments are hard to ignore, but the question for you is: would direct drive's limitation to hub gears give you what you need on the hills, compared with the wide ratios of derailleur systems?

For town bikes, though, direct drive could be the future.

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