The French have made it mandatory to have your bike marked

[Andy in Germany]

I doubt that’s true, it doesn’t seem much different to reading the letters and numbers on a car index plate.

If the reader can tell you the name and address of the owner from the bar code it could do.

And anyway, this is the UK - we don’t have to worry about unnecessary red tape like that these days.

Oh... yeah. Never mind then...

 

[IanSmithCSE]

Good afternoon,

A few years ago I bought a used bike that had been registered with the https://www.retainagroup.com/.

They charge a one-off £5 for the new owner to register a change of ownership and nothing for the previous owner to de-register, this compares very favourably with the annual £40 computer use tax, sorry data protection registration fee.

New registrations are about £12 including stickers/uv permanent marker. They gave enough stickers for the frame and each wheel but not enough for each component such as front mech, rear mech, each brifter etc.

I haven't tried to peel them off, but I suspect that there would be many people happy to buy anything marked anyway, "I didn't know it was stolen constable, honest."

I would expect someone looking at a stolen bike to look at the BB for a sticker or physical stamp but possibly not do a UV scan.

For me the easiest way to stop bike theft; people stop buying bikes and parts that they suspect are stolen.

Bye

Ian

 

[lane]

And the people that gave us the Maginot Line, now give us what every bike already has...frame numbers!

We've had frame numbers since time immemorial, it's just that practically no one notes them down or records them in an accessible manner - its3 the latter thatnis the problem, not the lack of any identifiable mark or serial number.

Little evidence that marking reduces theft, although it may make reuiniting bikes with their owners easier.

And as for RLJ'ing... the presence of very large, highly visible, reflective number plates does nothing to make car driving RLJ'ers think twice about zipping though, so I can see no reason why cycling road users would be any different because of a small bar code. As it is, if you've committed an offence and fail to identify yourself to an officer when requested they can arrest you and keep you until you are identified, so there is no additional threat of sanction hanging over any naughty people.

Good practice to get the Maginot Line referenced early in any discussion involving the French.

 

[Archie_tect]

If the reader can tell you the name and address of the owner from the bar code it could do.

Oooh, just a thought- if scrotes can get hold of hand held readers which identifies a name and/or an address they would be then have access to the location and owner of every high end bike they come across... even car thieves can't access that from reg plates!

That is a really strong case to resist any registration proposals.

 

[matticus]

Good practice to get the Maginot Line referenced early in any discussion involving the French.

Is it too late for Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys?

 

[Tom B]

And the people that gave us the Maginot Line, now give us what every bike already has...frame numbers!

The same thing I point out whenever anyone suggests the police should run bike marking / stamping excercises.

There is no way I'm letting someone like me near my bike with an etching machine or a stamp and lump hammer.

Just register the frame number on immobile.com for safe keeping.

Let's be honest most people don't even record that and can't provide it in the event of a theft. They then start waffling on that it's a really distinctive Carrera or Rockhopper because it's got a clip on light or a tear in the seat or some nonsense like that.

Then again these days police rarely collect fou d bikes and searching for serial number will be pretty much unheard of especially on third party systems. The only think anything like that which sort of works is IMEI numbers largely because networks keep a record, networks can register them as stolen / lost and they can be searched on PNC. But it's still not everyday they're checked.

*Although the Bike Register app is now available on police work phones, I don't know anyone who has it installed.

 

[mjr]

Just register the frame number on immobile.com [...] Bike Register

Ah, the "burglar's shopping list"s!

 

[Tom B]

Not in my experience.

But then my bikes are on there as

Hyacinth ABC123456
Monty XYZ123456


If you prefer you could write them on that old fashioned stuff called paper and leave a copy in a safety deposit box. But seriously if you've bought your stuff online the details of them.will be stored alongside your personal details on the sellers systems and likely on in your emails etc.

The risk is tiny.

 

[Ridgeway]

The Swiss used to have a bicycle number plate system:
View attachment 569046 ;
The letter indicated the canton and the white-on-red figures gave the year. The individual bike number can just be made out stamped into the bare-metal strip at the bottom of the plate. Most cyclists rivetted it to the rear mudguard; sporting cyclists tended to attach it to the seat bolt or the rear brake bolt. It was compulsory and issued for an annual fee. I think the system included a very basic third-party insurance. Obviously the procedure was deemed more trouble than it was worth as they abandoned it in 1988.

With modern technology, there could perhaps be a good case for an equivalent system.

It was replaced by a vignette that you purchased annually like the motorway one for your car, think it was about £15 p/bike. Each vignette had a unique number on it and it provided 3rd party insurance as well as a form of ID. It wasn't compulsory though and it fizzled out about 10yrs ago.

This was a pretty common site on many bikes as they were security stickers which meant it was difficult to get them off, 2011 was the last year i think ?

45kmh e-bikes are quite popular here though and they need to be registered (full plate) taxed and insured (3rd party is minimum) and there's a spec on the helmets you can where, seems reasonable to me.

This reminds me i need to get one for the car before end of this month

 

[TheDoctor]

I do wonder what problem this is intended to solve, and what are the chances it won't come close to doing so?
If it happens over here, then I predict the Government will give about £15 billion to Serco to set it up and register all bikes and riders, and it won't work.
Given that our household owns 1 car and about 15 bikes, you'll need something about five to ten times larger than the DVLA...

 

[keithmac]

I know all our bikes frame numbers, we had them marked and logged by the Police (Bike Safe?).

Any barcode would have to be stamped into the frame imo.

 

[DRM]

I do wonder what problem this is intended to solve, and what are the chances it won't come close to doing so?
If it happens over here, then I predict the Government will give about £15 billion to Serco to set it up and register all bikes and riders, and it won't work.
Given that our household owns 1 car and about 15 bikes, you'll need something about five to ten times larger than the DVLA...

Good point, I'm guessing as per usual the politicians haven't thought this stupid idea through, I'll bet most French cyclists are just like us, they'll have road bikes, gravel bikes, MTB (or VTT en Francais) an old steel thing to nip into town on for shopping, etc etc, plus theres all the bikes that kids get, then grow out of, get sold at the local Vide Grenier, replaced with a bigger one, you can see how quite quickly the idea gets out of hand & becomes unmanageable, I think they may live to regret this, just like the daft idea about carrying 2x breathalyser tests in your car that quickly turned into a shambles.
Also imagine the Gendarmerie deciding to have a check in popular cycling areas and having to deal with all the tourists in summer that bring their bikes with them, strapped to cars, motorhomes & tucked inside caravans, it's just unworkable, an answer to a problem no one has, all you have to do is note your bikes frame number down, it's not rocket science.

 

[oldworld]

That's news to me, not seen anything in the press but I'll do some searching on line.
It's possible, as rules do change and not long ago 50 cc mopeds didn't need to be registered but now they do.
If this turns out as fact I suspect it's more about tax gathering than a concern about stolen bikes.

My daughter bought a used car for 9000€ and on top of this she paid nearly 250€ to have the ownership changed into her name.
I think, but I'm not certain, the costlier the car the more you pay for the change.

 

[IanSmithCSE]

Good morning,

I do wonder what problem this is intended to solve, and what are the chances it won't come close to doing so?
If it happens over here, then I predict the Government will give about £15 billion to Serco to set it up and register all bikes and riders, and it won't work.
Given that our household owns 1 car and about 15 bikes, you'll need something about five to ten times larger than the DVLA...

Possibly the objective is similar to the MID (Motor Insurance Database), a database that must be kept up to date by law allowing police officers to take action based on querying one known database set up for law enforcement purposes.

Not on the MID, impound the car. Simple to explain and no judgements required.

With this bike data base it is a lot easier to create a law saying that having a bike without a sticker and a matching database entry is an arrestable offence in itself. The police could then work out if it is stolen at leisure.

As it stands in England even if I were to flag my bike as stolen on my registration service and the stickers were still intact, would a casual incident justify all the hassle for a police officer to contact the service. Added to which the service is probably not geared up to handle "Is it stolen" requests rather then "We have a known stolen" request.

Even if they did, in practice would a police offers feel that this was sufficient grounds to take any action, especially if the entry was say two years old?

Whether this extra power would be worth the effort seems debatable, would any police officer would like to comment on; I suspect that most bike thefts are made by people already known to them. So that would make bike theft in a big part a problem of what do you do after catching someone doing it.

In terms of database size, a 280 million row database (10 bikes per household) is non trivial but very common. Given the lack of urgency in updating it maintaining it from a web front end would be trivial. By urgency I mean that updates would probably be accepted from the user and confirmed as being in a queue, if the queue then took a few second to process in really busy times then no problem. I imagine that some shops would have a facility to pull all of the week's sales from their till system and send them in one go rather than an operator logging each sale as it happened. I used to be involved in legal email marketing, spam, so would regard this database as small

Bye

Ian

 

[Ming the Merciless]

Why do you think he moved there??

;-)

He is on the run from British authorities?