Flutterby™! : Only in Boulder 2007-09-04 18:44:15.724179+00

Only in Boulder

2007-09-04 18:44:15.724179+00 by ebradway 9 comments

Thief sneaks off with $10,000 bike from Boulder shop

I like to brag about the low crime rate in Boulder but I always qualify that with "except for bicycles". I think bike thieves come from out of state to pick over the bike racks here. And this article speaks volumes about the fact that Boulder is infested with "avid riders" who drop $1000s on their bikes and the general lack of paranoia!

Ouch! For the sake of those who might be searching for info on a used high end bike they've run across in some forum, that's a black with blue highlights 56cm Calfee Dragonfly, Campagnolo ("Campy") components and Topolino wheels, and in case the original article disappears, contact Vechio's bike shop at 303-440-3535.

One of our local shops had a $14k+ bike hanging in the window for a while, the guys in the shop said that they hoped Robin Williams was going to come by and fall for it, because even in the local crowd that was a bit steep.

Charlene's brother has a Calfee frame, before he built it up he took it out of its wrapping to show it to me, handed it to me, and I was blown away. I know that my frame is super light, but I've never had it clear of its components. Holding the frame by the bottom bracket between my thumb and forefinger was unreal.

And I'm not generally one to go gaga over aesthetics, but the Calfee black looks really sweet.

Oh, and on theivery: Berkeley's really bad, and I've heard that Eugene is also horrendous. Both are alleged to be worse than downtown in the big cities. I think there's something about the general leanings of the poli-sci departments in those towns and their attitudes towards property that impact the theft rates, but I haven't figured a way to analyze that separately from other factors.

On frames: I experience something similar when the guy at the bike shop on Frazier (which, more recently was a hot dog shop and then a sandwich shop) took a bare titanium Litespeed frame off a rack with two fingers and handed it to me across the counter like it was a piece of paper. I'm been wanting a Litespeed frame ever since (and was jealous of the Chattanooga bike cops who got to ride them).

On the Sunday ride from Niwot, there was a couple on a Litespeed tandem. It was a custom job. They lead the pack the entire way - including turning back for a latte 10 minutes into the ride (they caught back up).

On theivery: A good control would be Cambridge. Part of the "People's Republic" triumvirate: Berkeley, Boulder and Cambridge. What's hard to separate out is that these communities also foster tolerance toward their homeless populations.

We "lost" several bikes from the front of our camp at Burning Man this year, and reports of bikes "borrowed" were rampant. I caught one guy trying to ride my 'bent w/sidecar outside the "loo". Turns out he was just playing around, and could not ride it anyway (it's not easy). Princess Nancy thinks we need to do some bike thief fishing at our next Burning Man.

Maybe its not so much the Bolshevism of the local poly-sci departments as the recognition by the local miscreants that people leave $10,000, 6 oz. bikes laying around with inadequate security. They may be evil, but they're not stupid. Its just like the guy said when asked why he robbed banks: "That's where the money is."

Yabbut... I've seen and continue to see similar bicycles outside coffee shops in the racks outside coffee shops with no locks in my neck of the woods.

And in Berkeley you can't even park a beater without someone clipping the cables and stealing the brake levers and derailleurs.

We'll entrap bike thieves, tie them up and force them to listen to disco. (Which personally I wouldn't mind, at least not for a couple hours.) Or we'll just torture them in whatever other manner we see fit. There was lots of discussion around the camp about rigging tasers to the bikes, to activate after the bike got up to speed, then set off a homing signal.

Also, the comment about "continue the cycle" was heard more than once. Another telling comment I heard was "Someone stole my bike, so I commandeered another one and then someone stole it too." Note the choice of verbs. Commandeering IS stealing, you jerk!!! I don't remember ever locking our bikes up in '04 at Burning Man. Sad that in a place where community generosity normally reigns, bike thieves still exist.

And on a side note, no, the recumbent is not easy to ride, even with the sidecar, and I still have the huge bruise where my butt hit the playa to prove it. "Butt," alas, no pictures. (Of the crash - I could provide bruise pics but am not so inclined.)

The phrase "continue the cycle" sounds like it's time for some experiments in "radical community". One of the things I see with Burning Man is that as it's ballooned up to bloody huge everyone is trying to see it as their own view of utopia. Quite a few of the original "let's blow shit up and get wild" folks lost their utopia sometime in the late '90s, so they've stopped going, and quite a few of the new attendees are the "the world revolves around me" folks, thus there's a mini-Berkeley.

I've seen some people doing radical piercing and suspension and similar, I'm totally down with sending the bike thieves to those camps... If there's some Bee Gees thrown in for good measure, I'm down with that.

It would be fun to do an anthropological study of Burning Man. It seems to have evolved through several cycles - each casting off the die-hard believers of the Utopia it represented the prior year.

Maybe what you should do next year is steal all the bikes and lock them up. Then sell them back to the highest bidders ;0