Cycling's back with a bang

While pedal power is back in vogue, so is bicycle theft

CYCLING IS, in many ways, the perfect form of commuting. It's fast, cheap, wholesome, invigorating and very, very handy as long as you live within 10kms of your place of work - any further and you need steely determination and steelier thighs.

After years of inexplicable unpopularity, cycling is very much back in vogue in Ireland thanks to a fairly generous tax incentive which has encouraged more people back onto the saddle and the Dublin Bikes scheme which has captured the public imagination in a way that has exceeded most people's wildest expectations.

There are, of course, downsides to the bike - cars, fumes, potholes and rain, to name just four, although the risk of getting wet tends to be exaggerated by many anti-cyclists. According to Met Éireann, someone from Dublin who cycles 15 minutes to work five days a week, will get wet on only four days out of every 100 (readers on the western seaboard, where rain is more of an everyday experience, can feel free to be annoyed by that statistic).

The number of cyclists in Dublin is small but rising fast. It increased by 8 per cent last year and is up 30 per cent in five years although, as Dublin City Council's cycling officer Kieran Fallon told Price Watchlast week, "it is coming off an abysmal base".

Around 4 per cent of the commuters who cross the two canals into the city centre every day do so on a bike - the council has a target which would see that rise to 15 per cent by 2012.

The other real downside to cycling is theft, which has risen significantly since the Bike to Work tax incentive scheme was introduced at the beginning of last year. The scheme covers bicycles and accessories up to a maximum cost of €1,000. Your employer buys the bike and you pay for it, tax-free, over 12 months, which effectively knocks around 40 per cent off the price.

According to figures from the Central Statistics Office, there were 2,233 bicycles reported stolen in the first nine months of 2008. In the same period last year, immediately after the tax incentive scheme started, 3,136 bikes were reported stolen - the actual number is thought to be significantly higher as bicycle theft is among the most under-reported of crimes.

Price Watchhad its own brand new, €650 bike thieved shortly before Christmas and the newly purchased bicycles of five colleagues sitting within 10 metres of the Price Watchdesk have met with a similar fate in the last three months. All the bikes were locked when stolen but many of the locks sold in our bike shops offer little by way of deterrent for a canny bike thief wielding nothing more than a simple bolt cutter or a hammer.

Last week we would have lost our newly purchased replacement bike except we inadvertently interrupted a bike thief as he went about his wicked business in broad daylight outside our front door. In his haste to make his departure the thief deposited his bolt cutters - an implement that can be bought in any hardware store for little more than €20 - in a nearby hedge, thereby affording us the opportunity to test locks for the Value For Moneycolumn.

Some of the locks offered so little protection it's a wonder anyone would buy them. While David Cassidy of Dublin's Cyclogical bicycle shop cautions that there is no such thing as a lock which will offer 100 per cent security, he says there are some which come pretty close, although they cost a lot of money. He points to an absolutely enormous €205 lock from the highly-regarded Kryptonite company which, he says, is "as secure as you'll find on the planet" although even that can be cut with an angle grinder if the thief has enough time.

"Quite often the weakest point is what the bike is locked to and that is where people need to take the most care. A lot of poles in the city just lift right out of the ground so, while you think the bike is perfectly secure, it can be stolen in a heartbeat," he says.

"It might sound a bit selfish but the trick is to make your bike harder to steal than the ones around it. Most of the thieves know which locks are easy to open and which are more difficult," he continues. He recommends that people should pay in the region of 10 per cent of the cost of their bike on their lock.

"The cheapest locks on the market might look the same as the better options but there is a world of difference in terms of security. We get a lot of people coming in here who have had their bikes stolen and they are giving out about their locks but by then it is too late."

Cassidy believes the vast majority of bike thefts are perpetrated by opportunists who know they can convert the bike into cash - most frequently to buy drugs - fairly quickly. Fallon is not so convinced. He suspects that organised gangs are targeting expensive bikes bought under the Bike to Work scheme.

"Under the scheme people have €1,000 to spend and many are buying bikes which would otherwise have been well outside their price range. It may be that these are proving an irresistible temptation to gangs," he suggests.

"You have to have the equipment, you have to find the decent bikes and then you have to find a market to sell it. It would strike me as odd if it was all just casual theft. It is probably kids doing it but I wonder who they are doing it for?"

While many people don't bother reporting bike thefts to the Garda - it's not like they are ever likely to be recovered - Fallon says this misses the point. "People should always report the theft of a bike to the Garda. It doesn't matter if there is no chance of getting it back. If you don't report it then it becomes an accepted norm and bike theft should never be the accepted norm."

He points to the police in Amsterdam who have recently targeted the bike thieves by setting traps and targeting gangs, Fallon says, he has "an unbeatable combination of a crap bike and a great lock" but his employers in the council have also been trying to make things more difficult for the thieves in recent months. It opened its first off-street CCTV-monitored bike park in November in the Drury Street car park and, while it is not being used as often as the council would like, Fallon believes it is early days and is optimistic that when the council gets the world out about its existence, more people will start using it.

One area where theft has not been a problem, despite the dire predictions of many people, is the Dublin Bikes programme which Fallon describes "as the most successful in the world by any measure".

Some 24,700 people have registered as users of the service and over 280,000, mostly very short, journeys have been embarked upon since the scheme was launched last September. It is mostly locals who are using the service, says Fallon.

So far just one of the bikes has been stolen (it was subsequently recovered) while only a handful have been damaged by vandals which would suggest that the real secret to keeping your bikes safe has nothing to do with locks and everything to do with heaviness and ugliness.