Paranoia

I have spent several hours researching security.

This is really ugly. 70,000 bikes per year are stolen. Now I'm paranoid.

There are various ways to lock a bike, but most of them don’t make much difference when a pro is trying to steal your ride. I read one story where parking lot cameras caught five guys lifting a bike into a truck and driving off sixty seconds later. Apparently this is a pretty common strategy.

There are various videos on YouTube showing bikes getting pinched. It’s painful to watch.

Ignition kill switches, rotor locks, cable locks, etc., won’t stop these guys.

LoJack doesn’t work outside major metropolitan areas.

Alarms can help, but may cause the villagers to come after you with torches.

(If you still want a kill switch/alarm/pager, consider the Cyclone 866F.)

The key to stopping “lift-away” (aka “hoist”) theft is to make it take longer. Lock the bike to something that doesn’t move (like a lamp post or a gas meter)—or at least to another bike. Lock it through the frames, not the wheels. Or just ride a really crappy bike.

Some useful advice:

Never ride your scooter to a movie theater. The thieves know you’ll be gone for two hours.

Cover it. If they don’t know what it is or how it’s secured, it’s less tempting.

Park it in a well-lit, public place.

Here are my top picks:

1) Get comprehensive insurance.

2) Get an Almax 2.5m chain, wind it through the frames of two bikes, and secure it with a Squire SS65CS Stronghold lock. Really tough to beat, but very heavy and very expensive.

3) Get a cover. (I’m still researching this.)

4) Get a sign for the bike that says there is a camera pointed at it. (This produces FUD: Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. Every motorcycle theft I watched on YouTube started with giving the bike and the environment a careful once over—and making weak minded people think twice may be just enough to give them a brain aneurism.)

5) Get a RoadLok. It’s a lot more expensive than a rotor lock, but won’t tear up your bike if you forget to take it off (and you will forget). It’s good for stopping joy riders and opportunistic thieves. I think I would leave the yellow tag on it, since some brain donor might break my ignition before he figures out he can’t move the bike. Unfortunately, it’s not available for all bikes.

6) Add a remote detonator (I’m still looking for a source for this) that explodes a bottle of Liquid Ass.

Watch a top of the line cable get cut: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFaLmVqQibo

Watch top of the line chains get cut: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VC3hFr8p2ck

Top 10 bikes that get stolen, and the top ten places they get stolen:

http://www.sportrider.com/features/146_9812_motorcycle_theft/index.html

The UK has an interesting group called Lock2Lock. Basically, you put a sticker on your bike encouraging other Lock2Lock members to put their chain through your chain. Either person can unlock from the other.

Unfortunately, more than 50% of the population has an IQ of 100 or less, so the odds of having some drunken bonehead chain his front wheel to yours is maybe just a wee bit too high.