More than 2 million bikes are stolen each year in the United States

When someone steals your bike, you feel a blow in your stomach pit, and it really hurts — not just a few hours but multiple days. And it’s not just the pain of the theft but also the costs to purchase a new bike. Unfortunately, most people aren’t aware of the risk of their bike being stolen until it actually happens.

According to CBS News, close to 4,500 cyclists filed claims regarding stolen bikes between March and September 2020 in New York City alone. Unfortunately, this number is increasing each year across U.S. cities and has been an ongoing trend for the past years now. To put that in perspective, bicycle owners in Germany reported 260,000 bikes as stolen in 2020. The economic damage: 110 million Euros. Now imagine what that means for the United States …

J Allard from Project 529 Garage states that theft has become worse, and he believes that the number of stolen bikes sits around 2 million, including a high number of unreported cases. This is essential because only 1 in 5 bikes is reported to the police as stolen. The study Allard conducted included talks with cities and police departments, as well as extrapolated FBI data.

The problem is that bikes can easily be stolen. Thieves steal them from locked bike racks, cut the bike locks in the streets, and even from outside people’s houses in broad daylight. They also look for quality bikes such as expensive mountain bikes and electric bikes as they are usually worth the risk to them because they can resell them on a secondary market.

Although you can take different steps to prevent theft, like purchasing a high-quality lock and securing the frame when locking it, the best idea for bicycle owners is to register their bikes. With S4FE, you can easily register your high-quality bike online and note down characteristics that make it easy to identify the bike as your property. Use your bike’s serial number, add it to the database, and give yourself peace of mind within minutes.