“Bike Index can fill the gaps,” Fomby said.
Bike Index is the creation of Seth Herr, a former bike mechanic frustrated by his customers’ inability to get their stolen bikes back. Founded in Chicago in 2013 thanks to a Kickstarter campaign that raised more than $50,000, Bike Index is a small organization with no full-time staff. It has partnered with nonprofits, bike shops and law enforcement agencies across the country, including the Berkeley Police Department, Bike East Bay and several bike shops in Berkeley.
Users can register their bikes at no cost with the Bike Index. It is open source, so anyone can search the entire database if they encounter a bike they think may be stolen, or wants to ensure that they’re not buying stolen property when they purchase a bike from an online or local seller.
Bike Index also offers special tools for law enforcement to help it run large batches of serial numbers through the database.
Herr hopes that the index will encourage more people to ride bikes.
“We want to make biking for transportation less threatening,” he said.
Bike Index is in the process of becoming a nonprofit because, as Herr said, it is invested in and excited about providing a service, and “not looking to make quick cash.”
Robert Prinz, Bike East Bay’s education director, said this is one of the reasons Bike East Bay prefers the Bike Index to the many other bike registries out there.
“We trust that they’re working on this because they want to serve a public good, not because they see a chance to make money,” Prinz said, adding that the free registration is a crucial factor. “We want to make sure what we support is free and equitable.”
Berkeley’s Municipal Code includes an ordinance from 1976 that makes it illegal to use a bicycle that has not been registered and licensed. The license entails a nominal yearly fee of $2. Licensing is available through UCPD but, according to Prinz, hardly anyone goes through with the registration, which is not advertised and rarely enforced.
“Internal bike registration regulations are anachronistic at this point,” he said. “They’re usually only enforced when police are looking to ding a cyclist… for example, in the context of a protest, which is another aspect of this whole equity equation.”
Bike East Bay is trying to encourage the city to drop the registration and promote free registries. The latter is already in effect through the city’s police department: BPD’s bicycle registration page links directly to Bike Index.
Prinz said individual bike registration is only part of the bigger picture: Reducing bike theft is a complicated process. On an individual level, it is important to lock and store bikes properly — almost all bikes stolen in the East Bay have cable locks or are left outside overnight, neither of which is recommended.
He also advises shoppers to take responsibility for checking that a bike for sale isn’t stolen before buying it by running the serial number through Bike Index (which also offers a guide to not buying stolen bikes).
Not being cautious when buying bikes contributes to the problem
“By not being cautious about the bikes we’re buying, we’re contributing to the problem,” Prinz said. “And if you buy a stolen bike, it’s not actually yours. Technically, it can be recovered by the owner at any time, so there is a selfish motivation, too.”
Fomby’s bureau is working at a broader level, trying to get retailers to register bikes with the Bike Index before selling or reselling them, and working with UC Berkeley police to identify chronic offenders in the city. The more bikes are registered, the easier it becomes to return stolen bikes and crack down on hot spots of bike theft in the community.
Police said 314 bikes were reported stolen in Berkeley in the first half of 2015, compared with 328 in the same period last year. (That does not include stolen bikes reported to BART police or UCPD.) Fomby says the reduction is not much more than noise in the data and that the department wants to make a much bigger impact on that number, in part through registration.
According to UCPD: “In 2014 on the UC Berkeley campus alone, 299 bicycles were reported stolen resulting in a loss of $133,000 to the victims; most of whom are our students, staff members and faculty.”
Bike Index’s greatest strength, according to Herr, is its reach. The organization is committed to being open source and allowing all other registries access to its data.
Herr told Berkeleyside he hopes that, as more users register — the site has over 48,000 registered bikes currently — cyclists will realize that no other registry has such a widespread reach. That is important, he added, because bike thieves aren’t just stealing and selling bikes in Berkeley: They might take a stolen bike from Berkeley to Oakland or San Francisco or even farther away, rendering more local databases useless.
Nonetheless, the site still encourages its users to register with multiple databases if they have a strong local registry. Ultimately, Herr said, Bike Index is just in it to “make bike theft a little less convenient.”
