Dear RCC members
Bike theft is a really big issue which probably stops many people from cycling as much as they would like, or even leads to them giving up cycling altogether. I was talking to a friend recently and when I said that I was going to cycle into Reading, she immediately asked: ‘Won’t you get your bike stolen?’. If this is a widespread view, then there is obviously a big problem to tackle.
Personally, I have only had two bikes stolen in my life and the first was when I was a teenager and was helping to collect for the mission to seamen in our local village. This was in the days before bike locks were invented. In fact, I only started using a lock regularly after I came to Reading in 1979.
My wife and I had both our bikes stolen while in a London pub at the end of a CTC Sunday ride. They were locked to a Sheffield rack and to each other and it was obviously a very quick and professional job, and the police were singularly uninterested in this particular crime. However, my policy of not having a flashy expensive pair of wheels and religiously locking them up, even just for five minutes, seems to have worked for me over the years.
What of course we do not know is the true extent of the problem. From what we can gather, the chances of recovering stolen bikes are pretty low. The police do not have the resources to make it a high priority and the benefit to the thieves must be significant, although again how the trade in stolen bikes operates is far from clear.
There are obviously two closely related problems. How to make bike parking safer and easier is a major concern; Sam Hatfield’s article lays out some practical solutions: https://tinyurl.com/2uyppn94. But how to tackle the public perception of bike theft is a different and perhaps harder problem.
The Campaign recently carried out a survey of people who have been victims of bike theft to gather information on its impact on them (see page 6). It generated 25 responses and while we have some numbers from the police, we have no idea how many thefts are not actually reported and, perhaps as important, how frequent in real terms is bike theft. I have made many hundreds of trips to Reading town centre over the years and have not lost a bike. How representative is my experience and am I tempting fate by writing this?
Only this month the BBC website have reported that a boy from Coley Park has started a petition after both his and his Mum’s bikes were stolen from their home (see page 7). He hopes to press the Council, the Police and his local MP to take action and I can only commend him on this. However, this is another story that feeds into the perception that theft is widespread and perhaps unavoidable.
To try to get some clarity in this area we have invited Thames Valley Police to come to our open meeting on Thursday 18 June. Inspector Betsy Palmer has agreed to give a presentation and answer our questions, so please put the date in your diary and come along to give her a fair hearing.
Joe Edwards
RCC Chairman
(chair@readingcyclecampaign.org.uk)
