the summer of 2012.

Between May and September 2012, 1554 bikes were stolen that were registered with Bike Shepherd. These were broken down into three categories:

?Unregistered & untagged bikes where the owner registers the bike with Bike Shepherd after the bike was stolen
?Bikes registered with Bike Shepherd but not tagged with Pulse ID tags
?Bikes registered with Bike Shepherd and tagged with Pulse ID tags
Of the 1554 bikes stolen, 2% or 49 were returned to their rightful owner. At first glance, this may look like a low recovery rate.

However, of all bikes stolen, some were unregistered and therefore harder to trace, while others were just registered but not tagged. Both of these would keep recovery rates on the low side.

In addition, there’s no way to know how many owners of recovered bikes don’t report their recovered bikes to Bike Shepherd, which would also keep the recovery stats lower than normal.

What we do know is registered but untagged bikes drive two things – higher theft rates and lower recovery

1 Higher theft rates; high because the thief doesn’t know the bike is registered because there’s no tag and he steals it instead of moving on to easier prey;

2 Lower recovery rates; low because the police or Good Samaritans don’t know see a tag to check the bike in the first place to see if its stolen, and if so, alert the owner of its whereabouts.

In the third scenario, where a bike is registered and tagged, the real winners are the owners who had bikes registered and tagged with Bike Shepherd Pulse tags. Recovery rates were so high we had to double-check our figures! Of the 49 bikes recovered in our summer statistics, every one was registered and tagged with Bike Shepherd Pulse ID tag, which amounts to a 100% recovery rate.

they should go into politics with maths like this 😉

What we do know is registered but untagged bikes drive two things – higher theft rates and lower recovery

so my best bet is not to register my bike as it reduces the chances of it being stolen?

I’m already a winner 🙂

They should have just said, “everyone with a tag on their bike got it recovered after it was stolen”, all that other stuff is meaningless.

and 49 out of 1554 is 3%

They should have just said, “everyone with a tag on their bike got it recovered after it was stolen”, all that other stuff is meaningless.

You have fallen for their devilish trap! They said 100% of the bikes recovered had a tag on, not 100% of bikes with a tag on that were stolen were recovered. Big difference.

damn it!

They should have just said, “everyone with a tag on their bike got it recovered after it was stolen”,

They could have said that.

But they would have been lying if they did 😉

(A bit slow 🙂 )

It’s genius isn’t it!

“We were told that 49 bikes were recovered and remarkably all 49 of these bikes had a sticker on telling the police to contact us.”

You have fallen for their devilish trap! They said 100% of the bikes recovered had a tag on, not 100% of bikes with a tag on that were stolen were recovered. Big difference.

Dogs have 4 legs. My cat has 4 legs. Therefore my cat is a dog.

Probably why the comments have been removed 😉

why is this a shock, i’m a marketing chap, everyone knows that if you have 2 its nearly 50, 51 is nearly 100 and 101 is nearly 1000. and i’m being totally serious.

now, this might be a silly question, but if I had nicked one of these bikes, and the only thing that makes a difference to discovery and recovery is that sticker, what is to stop me just peeling the sticker off??? or am I missing some thing here? Are villians capable of breaking into garages, defeating locks and cables but thwarted by a bit of sticky paper??

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZqs36C5sgM[/video]