My Dublin Bike got stolen on Wednesday, in broad daylight. Broad daylight is a mindless cliche, I know. But it was a late afternoon in August, on a wide street (Clanbrassil Upper) lined with only two-storey houses. The daylight was definitely broader than it would have been in many parts of the city, or in November.
Even so, I came out of a cafe where I had been having tea with my sister, and there the bike was, gone. Had I forgotten to lock it? No, I distinctly remembered locking it to a pole. Besides, I had the key. You can’t take the key out of a Dublin Bike unless it’s locked.
Then I wondered had I misremembered the pole. No again. The other poles nearby were equally bike-less. And now I noticed, ominously, that at the bottom of the pole I’d used lay two kryptonite-style locks.
Both were intact, suggesting either that local bicycle owners used the same pole so often they left their locks there permanently, or that thieves had found a way of stealing the bikes without unlocking them.
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I was nevertheless baffled at the turn of events. Being instantly recognisable, Dublin Bikes have no resale value. Nor, in themselves, are they objects of desire.
This is central to the success of the whole free-bike model, in fact, including the Vélibs of Paris. In a city of high aesthetic values, those too are deliberately devoid of beauty or charm or anything that might make you want to bring one home with you.
Dublin Bikes are heavy, clunky and have the suspensions of a wheelbarrow. Even on the best roads, they are deeply lacking in empathy with the human posterior. But ridden on suboptimal surfaces such as cobbles, potholes, roadside drains, etc, they are liable to find any loose dental fillings you might have and shake them out of you.
The point is, the bikes are built for durability rather than comfort. What they offer is no-frills convenience, like Ryanair, except with bigger baggage allowances. I have occasionally carried a 10kg suitcase in the basket of a Dublin Bike, or wheeled a 7ft Christmas tree home on one, draped over basket, crossbar and saddle (the tree, that is, not me).
Who would anyone steal such a bicycle? There are only two possible motivations I can think of: (a) a transport emergency of some kind or (b) pure badness. But if it was the former, and somebody needed to commandeer a bike in a hurry for a one-off trip, he must have been carrying a bolt-cutter to clip the cable.
When I rang the helpline, the woman at the other end suggested it was more likely a variation of (b). Yes, she confirmed, the bicycles do get stolen occasionally, by vandals who then just dump them. If that happened in my case, the bike might be returned to one of the docking stations eventually. Otherwise, she said, I would be charged €150 for its loss.
“We encourage users to leave the bikes in stations rather than lock them,” she said, by way of a mild lecture. To which I replied that I would happily have docked mine in a station, except that there was none within a 10-minute walk of my location.
Even though that was within the canals, and close to an area known as The Tenters – which has more hipsters per square metre than most suburbs – it’s a black hole on the Dublin Bike map. This was no excuse, the woman said. If the borrowed bicycle didn’t turn up again somewhere, I’d still be paying.
I started using this service back in 2012, after my last personally owned bike got stolen. That happened in slightly narrower daylight, outside the seven-storey offices of The Irish Times.
I’d just dropped in to pick up post, but it was the day of an Ireland-Sweden football match. And my brief visit to the newsroom coincided with the passage of 3,000 Swedish fans down Townsend Street towards the stadium, escorted by gardaí.
While I watched the colourful spectacle from the windows above, some fecker with a bolt cutter was taking advantage of the distraction to cut the lock on my expensive Trek. A small consolation was that this coincided with the extension of the Dublin Bikes scheme to the road where I lived. So I took the hint and have not owned a bike again since.
Mulling that game changer at the time, I mentioned the unattractiveness of the socialised bikes but added: “On the plus side, you never have to worry about lights or locks again. An enlightened public-private partnership supplies the hardware, and risks are shared by the community at large.”
Then, poignantly in retrospect, I added: “Not the least impressive thing about the Dublin scheme is how free of theft or vandalism it has been.” Oh dear. This week’s event may prove to be another game changer. Either way, for the moment, I have been forced to fall back on an older free transport scheme, the one known as “Shanks’s Mare”.
