Back in the saddle...
Entry posted by Cataduanes
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So as I elucidated on a past blog entry (link) I am a wee bit crazy about cycling, fanatical would probably be a good way of putting it. Back then I was riding a Kona Dew Deluxe (2010 model), and it got used a hell of a lot…doing a 12km commute during the weekdays and probably notching up a further 5 Km’s over the weekends, in short she got rode hard (no innuendo intended). But last month some piece of !@#$ decided to steal my rig…and not off the street but from the ‘secure’ underground car/bike parking area underneath my apartment block. With full CCTV coverage we got the guys face in glorious Technicolor (no mask…not even a baseball cap, is that !@#$@#$ brazen or what!).
But despite this evidence looking for one guy and a bike in London (estimated population of just under 8 million people) is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Hell according to the British home office around 533,000 bikes were stolen from 2009 to 2010!! It is a burgeoning problem and rightly or wrongly it is not considered a priority by the police (who admittedly have their hands full in our great city with rising violent crime among the youth among other things). Of course such numbers of theft are in due part to a demand for decent bikes at a cheap price purchased with no questions ask (to use a popular British expression ‘off the back of a lorry’), such people looking for a deal fuel the rampant theft of bikes in London and this seems unlikely to change, because lets face it most people are unprincipled and care little for the wider community. But it is obviously big business as the losses show, based on police crime statistics from 2010, a report released in June 2010 suggested that bicycle theft costs British cyclists around £80m a year! No small amount by anyone’s standards.
A bike lock manufacturer actually made a short film based on a experiment to gauge how the average man in the street reacts to bike theft, setting up 10 bikes they staged 10 thefts and each one not a single member of the public intervened in what was clearly a crime: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/bike-blog/2012/feb/06/protect-bikes-theft
Oh well life goes on and I have purchased a new rig, a stunning Kona Band Wagon (2011 model) with a chrome/white scheme. I have been riding Kona’s for years now and I am very loyal to the brand, besides lets face it Canada has some of the best Bicycle manufacturers in the world.
I will take out fresh insurance and buy the most heavy duty locks known to man (not to mention that it is locked up securely in my 'secure’ underground car park)…but even then it will not stop the possibility of it being stolen in the future, because if a thief wants something he will go for it, all you can do is make it as difficult as possible for the $%&@ers. But the bottom line is that I will not let some ‘tea leaf’ (British slang for a thief) stop me riding, enjoying the thrill of filtering through traffic at speed and generally pissing off Taxi Drivers (one of a London’s cyclists common enemies on the road) …NEVER GIVE IN & RIDE ON BROTHERS AND SISTERS!!
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