No, not really a challenge, perhaps a rebuttal to those who think its only safe in Japan. I left my bike over friday night at Cambridge railway station, and forgot to remove the front light. When I came back... it was still there. Pathetic or what?
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It's interesting that you consider a single non-theft event to be bloggable - if I thought the same I would write about little else :-)
And how desperate do you think they would have to be to scour the thousands of bikes at the station just looking for removable lights?
James -
There's a tradition that any bike left outside of Cambridge train station ends up stripped and useless within about 5 minutes. I avoided this during my time at Cambridge by dint of having a bike which looked to all intents and purposes as if it had already been vandalised..
Thats funny- I was in Cambridge a few years ago for an interview and saw hordes of what looked like perfectly useable bikes outside the train station.
When I was at St Andrews, there were fewer bikes, but I do not recall any great trouble with theft. However there was a story about the town setting up some kind of cycle borrowing scheme for tourists etc to get around. Only a bloke from Dundee came along and piled them all into his van and took them away...
"Thats funny- I was in Cambridge a few years ago for an interview and saw hordes of what looked like perfectly useable bikes outside the train station."
Some of those bikes will have been there for years and I bet some are still there today. I'm sure there was a bike there that hadn't moved for the few years I lived in Cambridge.
With scrap the value it is, I suppose the CCTV will be the only thing stopping someone coming along with a JCB and ripping everything off and into a truck to sell.
Do not try this trick in Oxford. Years ago, I left my bike outside College one night and the next morning it had gone: the thieves had cut through the signpost I locked it to. I walked down the hill to the police station, and there was my bike--the cops had found it discarded on the roadside, with my Kryptonite lock still in place ;-)
More recently, it seemed organised bike criminals were operating in Windsor this summer: bikes were disappearing in batches on certain days (depending on whether a large white transit van was available to toss them in and drive to another town for instant flogging, I guess.)
There are certainly thieves in the Bay Area who go around stealing bicycle lights alone.