One in six people living in Denmark admit having stolen a bicycle at some point – although another interpretation may be that in many cases they ‘borrowed’ it, then neglected to return the bike to where they found it afterwards.
The startling finding from the country which through infrastructure such as Copenhagen’s Cykelslangen, or ‘cycle snake’ bridge, pictured above, is the envy of cycle campaigners worldwide, comes from a YouGov poll carried out for Danish insurance company, Alm. Brand, reports The Local.
It doesn’t seem that armies of Danes are going out equipped with bolt-croppers with the intention of finding a bike to sell at Copenhagen’s equivalent of London’s Brick Lane market the following weekend, however.
Instead, it seems that often people, and youngsters in particular, are using a ‘borrowed’ bike to get themselves home after a night out – perhaps aided in their ability to do so by the fact, as reported by BBC News last week, that bicycles in Copenhagen are rarely secured to a fixed object, as they might be in other cities.
Alm. Brand spokesman Mikael Sundby told Metroxpress: “I don’t think cycle thieves think about the consequences for the individual [bike owners] or for society. They probably just think that it’s merely a bike that can be easily replaced.
“But it’s not pocket change that our society is losing every day, and it is frustrating for those it affects.”
Where someone does avail themselves of a bike temporarily, it doesn’t seem that they then return to put it back where they find it, and with 200 bicycles stolen a day in Denmark – and fewer than 1 per cent of cases resulting in criminal charges – the problem is costing the county’s insurance industry 200 million kroner (£21 million) annually.
Professor of law Sten Schaumburg-Müller told Metroxpress: “There are many people who at one point in their youth have stolen a bicycle late at night to get home from a night out. And maybe they’ve stolen a bike that looked a little bit run down.
He added: “Bike theft is something that is difficult to solve. But it’s also clear that if an area is consistently under-prioritised, that will have an effect on the magnitude of the problem.”
8 thoughts on “One in six Danes admit they’ve stolen a bicycle, says survey”
There’s something rotten in
There’s something rotten in the State of Denmark.
In my mis-spent youth in
In my mis-spent youth in Berlin the assumption was that you didn’t so much buy a second hand bike, you rented it until it got nicked again.
It’s the one thing I really
It’s the one thing I really didn’t like about Copenhagen, you can’t have a nice bike. Or rather you can, but you’d have to have a beater to use as a utility bike as well.
What sort of crappie locks
What sort of crappie locks are they using that a drunk can just nick their bike?
GREGJONES wrote:What sort of
An awful lot of the time they don’t! The most popular method to stop a thief is to use a crappie bike, and forget the crappie lock. You do find a lot of ring locks, the type that bolt to the frame near the brake mount and go through the rear wheel. The bike parks are often so crowded that there’s nothing to lock to, so they just lock the wheel so no one can simply ride off when they’re looking for a bike to “borrow”.
Unfortunately, someone worked out a trivial way of opening the most popular models (as bad as the bic pen exploit) and thousands of them became next to useless overnight.
bikebot wrote:GREGJONES
Do you mean the famous case of Kryptonite locks? If that is the case, it has not been true for a few years now.
mikroos wrote:bikebot
I know, I’m just referring to it as everyone knows it, and how urgent it was to get those locks swapped sharpish if you had one!
The exploit with the Danish locks was that you could open them with a blank key, suddenly thousands of people were buying and selling blanks and it was quite a major story in the country when it happened. Even a proper blank wasn’t necessary, it just made it easier.
Here’s a demo – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4p4uEQA4PI
It’s largely unknown about here as that style of lock is really rare in the UK.
They don’t use locks – thats
They don’t use locks – thats the problem! If they locked the things up it would all be ok!