Essentially a private police force arising from the incompetence of the actual police.
All bikes have serial numbers on them, I wouldn’t be against governments having mandated registration and all marketplaces must include the bikes serial number. Similar to what is done for cars.
E-bikes do have the advantage of having the possibility of sophisticated anti theft tech. I’d say they should just lock the mechanism entirely making the bike mostly unusable.
It's not a question or competence, but resourcing. I'd generally prefer police to dedicate their finite resources to more important crimes.
TFA describes one ebike manufacturer's tracking solution as much as the hunters.
Serial number registration (and mandating that on ads) requires enforcement effort, which, given the price of a bike, I don't think is warranted.
And do you really want your e-bike to work or not depending on what some server somewhere says? Like, what happens when the company can't pay its server bills anymore. Not for me.
The likelihood of my bike being stolen is so many multiples above the likelihood of the system messing up and locking my bike incorrectly.
One of these problems is almost a certainty so there is a fair bit of slack do the solution.
The problem is so much more than just the value of the bike. Having a bike stolen is so common and so frequent that it just discourages people from cycling all together. I think a large amount of resources should be dedicated to solving this problem. Catching bike thieves is higher value than just the recovered bike.
Hypothetically, what if with every bike purchase, the government were to provide for free a high-quality bike lock (either of a fixed value, or proportionate to the price of the bike)? That would likely reduce bike theft to professional thieves targeting high-value bikes (the likes of which are probably insured, or the owners can easily afford to replace).
I agree that theft discourages cycling, but there are so many things that discourage cycling more (most around driver behaviour and road design). A stolen bike is annoying, but it's not going to kill you. Focus enforcement on reducing things that might kill you, and you'll encourage cycling a lot more.
A $100 angle grinder can cut through anything short of a $300 Altor SAF (which is not very practical to use on top of being expensive). Cutting bike locks unfortunately does not require particularly expensive tools only available to high-end criminals.
A decent chain lock will make anyone with an angle grinder (who values their eyes) think twice. And a $100 angle grinder is still a significant hurdle for many bike thieves; and either requires a power lead, or battery options are pretty low powered for that price.
All bikes have serial numbers on them, I wouldn’t be against governments having mandated registration and all marketplaces must include the bikes serial number. Similar to what is done for cars.
E-bikes do have the advantage of having the possibility of sophisticated anti theft tech. I’d say they should just lock the mechanism entirely making the bike mostly unusable.