Fwd: Questions for Honolulu bike theft reduction proposal

[Colin Leath]

I got a response to my questions from bikeindex.

I've added them in an appendix to the proposal/report and pasted them below, in rough draft form:

Questions for Bike Index and their responses

Colin:

Seth (of BikeIndex.org),

I have a few more questions:

(1) Do you recommend making bike registration via bikeindex.org mandatory for all newly sold bikes? Since Hawaii's current system is that way we have that opportunity here. I imagine that even in Walmart, the store employee could use a web-enabled computer to register each bike sold.

• However: what if the customer does not have an email address?

It seems that it might make more sense mandate that each store give people the option of registering their bike. . .

Seth:

We recommend making registration opt out, and that's what our store partners do. It happens automatically, even if no one says or does anything. But if someone specifically asks not to be registered, we don't register them.

Colin:

(2) We have many transients here--Tourists, college students, snowbirds. Some may buy a cheap bike and then abandon it. If bikes are registered at sale and then abandoned, is there a way to still transfer ownership at some point? What if a bunch of abandoned bikes are rounded up on campus and then donated to a bicycle cooperative? How can the cooperative enable the transferring of the registration to the new owner?

If the owner of the bike is contacted via email and there is not a response for a certain length of time, it would seem that there should be some way of transferring the bike to someone new at that point. Can we have the option of setting that time period in our local committee? I've heard that in the Netherlands abandonded/impounded bikes have to be picked up in two weeks. That may be too short a time for us.

Seth:

We can definitely set that up! You could give us a list of bikes that you are donating and we would email the owners a standard message - warning them that the bike is about to be donated, and if they don't want that to happen they need to tell us/you, or pick it up in 2 days, or whatever. Just so long as there is some warning.

Colin:

(3) Is there a way to generate reports about bike theft trends in Hawaii? We would like to be able to target our efforts and measure progress, year by year, or even month by month.

Seth:

Yes. By any time period that you would like. We provide spreadsheet exports on thefts for police departments.

Colin:

(4) It appears that location gets recorded when a bike is reported stolen, and so high-risk areas could be identified from that. Is that the case? How can we do that?

Seth:

We're working on some mapping projects right now to make that easier. They will be released by the end of the week. Check back in then?

Colin:

(5) Would it also be possible to record how the bike was locked? (Ulock/cable/not sure/left unlocked, through frame or not).

Seth:

We already ask people to tell us about how the bike was locked. The mapping displays we're working on won't include that data but you'd be able to add it in yourself.

(6) Do you have any plans for offering or selling labels such as do https://project529.com/, or in the UK, https://www.bikeregister.com/, beyond offering the printable spoke card?

If not, why not? I did read about your experiment with the TrakR. It does seem like it would be helpful to have an easy way for police and bystanders to scan large numbers of bikes quickly.

Seth:

Yes, but they're slow to fruition because we wanted to make sure they didn't have any of the drawbacks products have had in the past. We also wanted to make sure that they weren't expensive.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Seth Herr <se...@bikeindex.org>
Date: 13 April 2015 at 15:31
Subject: Re: Questions for Honolulu bike theft reduction proposal
To: Colin Leath <colin...@gmail.com>

Hey Colin, I'm sorry for my tardy reply!

1. We recommend making registration opt out, and that's what our store partners do. It happens automatically, even if no one says or does anything. But if someone specifically asks not to be registered, we don't register them.

2. We can definitely set that up! You could give us a list of bikes that you are donating and we would email the owners a standard message - warning them that the bike is about to be donated, and if they don't want that to happen they need to tell us/you, or pick it up in 2 days, or whatever. Just so long as there is some warning.

3. Yes. By any time period that you would like. We provide spreadsheet exports on thefts for police departments.

4. We're working on some mapping projects right now to make that easier. They will be released by the end of the week. Check back in then?

5. We already ask people to tell us about how the bike was locked. The mapping displays we're working on won't include that data but you'd be able to add it in yourself.

6. Yes, but they're slow to fruition because we wanted to make sure they didn't have any of the drawbacks products have had in the past. We also wanted to make sure that they weren't expensive.