Saturday, June 25, 2011

LHT WTF?

Admittedly, this Long Haul Trucker was built for a tall person, and that rack is waaaay down there, but seriously? This is how the dude locks his bike?

It’s almost enough to make a guy want to take the bike for a few hours, if there was a way to find the owner and return it after he promised himself to never repeat such a mistake.

Poorly locked bikes always amaze me. I once saw a kid’s bike at my daughter’s school with a cheap cable running through the rack and around the seatpost ... with more than enough slack cable to simply pull it off around the saddle.

In college, I was walking out of the student union one day when I heard a young woman exclaim to her friend, “Where’s my bike?! I left it right here!” When the friend asked if she had locked it, she replied, “YES!”

The problem was, she was standing in the middle of a half-acre of featureless, bike-rack-free concrete. She was one of many students who routinely ran a cable lock through the front wheel and through the frame, then assumed no thief would simply pick up the bike and carry it away.

Although bikes are stolen here every day, Anchorage has never seemed like a city where serious bike thieves prowl. I suspect many thefts are crimes of opportunity.

Slow down and double-check your lock before walking away. Don’t give thieves an opportunity.

1 comment:

Tabb said...

If I can't remember locking my LHT, I go back down five floors to the front of the building and check. Poorly locked bikes are a bit of a pet peeve of mine too. Poorly locked expensive bikes even more so, it was a big deal for me to spend over $1000 on my LHT, no way am I going to lose it to stupidity.

But worse even than poorly locked bikes are nice bikes that are locked and forgotten. I currently know of 2-3 of these in my near vicinity. I often look at these bikes as potential sources for used/free parts. Fortunately, for the owners of these forgotten bikes, I'm too honest to start taking them down right there.