I have owned 11 bikes. This is how they were stolen

Then, resignedly, I picked up my helmet — a helmet that has outlasted three bikes — and began the walk home.

Mine is a very ordinary tale. In the last year for which there is data, according to crime surveys in England and Wales it is estimated that more than 200,000 bicycles were stolen. Less than half of bike thefts are reported (in 2020, the figure was 75,000). Of those reports, over 90 per cent resulted in no suspect being identified, while there were 1,200 charges or summons. A bit over 1 in 200 thefts result, in other words, in consequences. None of mine ever has.

“It is now a national policy goal to encourage more people to cycle,” says Whipple

TOM WHIPPLE

I have bought cheap and expensive bikes, I have used multiple cheap locks and single expensive locks. I have left bikes in lit places and secure places. Always, ultimately, the outcome is the same: a lock on the floor and a bike nowhere to be seen. I have never owned a bicycle that has not later been stolen.

It is now a national policy goal to encourage more people to cycle. At the same time it can sometimes feel like, in Britain, bike theft is legal.

“It’s a really serious problem,” says Will Norman, the Transport for London walking and cycling commissioner. He, most recently, had his Brompton bicycle nicked (“I made the mistake of locking it up outside, and that went”). First it is a problem for the victim. “You know what it’s like, I know what it’s like and I think a lot of London knows what it’s like.”

After that, though, it becomes a problem for the country. “It has some quite serious policy implications . . . there is a real impact on numbers.

“We know 15 per cent of people who’ve had their bike stolen stop cycling completely. Something like 20 per cent stop temporarily. About 27 per cent still cycle, but cycle less.”

Not me, I think with perverse pride. I’ve just kept on doggedly persisting. Bike 2 I can’t really remember. An old racing bike, I think. Bike 3 was at university; I fixed it to a bollard and someone just lifted it over the bollard. Bike 4’s demise was also my fault, insofar as any of this is my fault. I used a cable lock and someone snipped straight through.

Bike 5 was expensive, and I left it locked at a station overnight — the thief could take his time with that one.

● Don’t engrave your Eircode on your bike, warns Valerie Flynn
● Top female cyclist warns against riding alone

Bike 6 was an old banger; inexplicably I had locked only the wheel. They took the frame, for all it was worth. Bike 7 was in a bike shed, in a gated community. I still don’t know how they got it over the fence. I remember going round a market in the East End of London, looking for it on the advice of the police. I doubt they had much more hope than me; they closed the case minutes after my call.

What could I have done differently? “It’s a very, very difficult challenge,” Norman says. “And the responsibility doesn’t fall within one agency.” He is looking to build more secure parking in more places. He is also looking to us. People like me need to work harder not to get their bike stolen.

“A lot of people lock very expensive bikes in their shed with a small padlock. A lot of people use locks on the bike that you could almost cut with a pair of scissors. There is a responsibility for bike shops and the industry in general to focus on actually selling quality locks, which are a deterrent.”

Deterrence, after all, is not going to come from the criminal justice system.

Bike 8 was stolen from a station cycle rack, where I had parked it directly beneath a camera. This time, I thought, we have them. Triumphantly I went to the police. “Look!” I said. “You will be able to see them.” They refused to look at the footage unless I could narrow it down to a window shorter than a few hours. This is, I discovered, a common response.

Afterwards I found a chatroom thread among Cambridge computer scientists, one of whom had also been told that unless he could pin down the moment of theft no one would look at the footage. He said he had tried to explain sorting algorithms to police — he was a computer scientist, after all.

You don’t watch the whole thing, he said. You use a binary search. You fast forward to halfway, see if the bike is there and, if it is, zoom to three quarters of the way through. But if it wasn’t there at the halfway mark, you rewind to a quarter of the way through. It’s very quick. In fact, he had pointed out, if the CCTV footage stretched back to the dawn of humanity it would probably have only taken an hour to find the moment of theft. This argument didn’t go down well.

I made a (slightly more diplomatic) nuisance of myself and they eventually looked at the footage. The policewoman I dealt with was lovely about it, but in the end the image wasn’t clear. Maybe they were right not to bother.

Last year it was estimated that over 200,000 bicycles were stolen

Bike 9 was the only one taken from my house. Several garages on the road were hit at the same time, although few as dramatically as ours: the entire door was crowbarred off. This time the helmet had gone too. Maybe they were safety-conscious thieves? No. After calling the police, I walked along the road — and found the helmet in a bush. I got back in touch.

“I’ve found the helmet,” I said. Pause. Silence. “I thought . . . maybe,” I stuttered, “it might help you . . . with fingerprints?” My suggestion was never spoken of again. Mind you, we never spoke of anything again. After doing their duty — dispensing the crime reference number for insurance purposes — the case was closed.

It is easy to get cross with the police. Aren’t they meant to at least pretend to investigate? Isn’t that why we pay our taxes? It is easy but, Norman says, not fair.

“If we just leave it to the police to investigate after the horse has bolted — or after the bolt has been cut — it’s an exceptionally expensive way to do it.” According to statistics from the Crime Survey of England and Wales, thefts have dropped sharply in the past decade, and more than halved from a peak around the time my first bike was stolen.

There are, he says, intelligence-led operations that seek out the gangs behind the thefts, with some success.

There is also a problem. When they seize bikes, who do they return them to? Almost none of us think to record and register the frame numbers of our bicycles.

Guiltily, I realise that I am one of those who have never registered a bike. Sometimes I do remember to record the frame numbers. This time I did, but then lost it. Still, the guilt is not all mine. None of this would happen if there wasn’t somewhere to sell the bikes.

Bike number 10 went because I left it overnight. The trains had gone wrong and I had come back, late, to a different station. I went to pick it up the next morning and, of course, it wasn’t there.

Angry at the thieves, but most of all angry at myself, I went on Gumtree to try to find it. It wasn’t there, but plenty else was. One account offered half a dozen bikes, as well as a rolling supply of clothes from various local shops, all still with their labels. There was another that never had fewer than a dozen bikes for sale. Each one, the man who ran the account said, came from a recently deceased uncle. Whether he had many uncles, who had recently suffered mass unclecide, or whether there was one uncle who was to bikes what Imelda Marcos was to shoes, was not clear.

James Brown is the managing director of Selectamark Security Systems. The ease of bike sales infuriates him. His company runs BikeRegister, a database of frame numbers used by most police forces — and which, among those I speak to, comes the closest to being a genuine solution.

He doesn’t completely let the police off the hook — he makes the point that very few people steal just one bike, and very few stop at bikes. Maybe their theft shouldn’t be low priority?

Tom Whipple on the Tarka Trail, part of Sustran's Coastal Devon route

TOM WHIPPLE

We could all make the police’s life easier, though. At the moment, most of us don’t register our bikes. If we did, he argues, it would make a big difference. “If, as a police officer, you stop ten people on a bike who you think might have stolen those bikes, and you get zero hits, then you lose the appetite to do it.” If they had confidence that, as with cars, all stolen bikes appeared? Then it would be different.

In France there is a national bicycle database and all newly sold bikes have to be on it. In the UK attempts to make retailers automatically register bikes at the point of sale have failed. So too has Selectamark’s efforts to work with Gumtree and other companies. After years of negotiation, including at one point providing software, they have failed to convince them to mandate that all sales include a frame number. Brown has given up. “I hate to say it but if they wanted to do it, they’d have done it.”

Joe Rindsland, trust and safety manager at Gumtree UK, says they are keen to combat bike theft: “At Gumtree, we take the issue of cycle crime very seriously. We have been working in collaboration with law enforcement bodies . . . to address the challenges surrounding the sale of stolen bicycles on online marketplaces for many years.”

Finally, we come to bike number 11. Like a serial romantic who never learns, I really grew to love that bike. It was green and sort of retro. I demonstrated my love with a £130 lock. I never used it if I would be back late. To no avail.

This time, for the first time, I was not alone. Standing beside me that desolate evening, looking confusedly at his own helmet and chain, was, I realised, another man. A couple of other locks and helmets lay on the ground, yet to be claimed. Someone had come in just after dark with a portable angle grinder and taken a job lot.

Together my partner in crime and I walked back.

There is no easy answer to bike theft, and any answer that does come will involve the public and the private sector, as well as police. I can glibly cite broken windows theory, I can talk about how small crimes must lead to big. I’m not a police chief arriving at work with a set of competing priorities and not enough officers to staff them.

But, if I might, there is one factor I would add in, not caught in crime statistics, that is worth considering, that gets weakened a little every time there is a theft without consequences: the social contract.

That evening, as we headed off bikeless into the dark together — both of us pointlessly holding our broken locks — we got talking. My fellow victim had been using his bike to get to job interviews; he wanted to be a chef. Now he had no bike.

“I don’t know,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “It feels like some people try . . . work . . . do the right thing. We do what we are meant to do. And other people . . .” He trailed off.

Have you had one of your bikes stolen? Let us know in the comments section