Source: City of Vancouver, Crime Statistics, Data accessed March 10, 2017

In 2016, a Square One Insurance report said that Vancouver had the most bikes stolen per capita of any major city in Canada. Square One found that there were 513 bike thefts per capita in Vancouver, whereas the next highest on the list, Calgary, had 250 thefts per capita.

Vancouver, a city where bikes are frequently used as smogless, traffic-friendly alternatives to cars, saw bike theft increase steadily between 2011 and 2015, according to the afore mentioned data analysis. According to the same analysis, thieves have stolen more than 13,000 bikes since 2011.

“It’s an epidemic,” says J Allard, creator of the 529 Garage, a bike registration database.

But there’s hope. For the first time in five years, bike thefts have dropped, and it may just be thanks to Allard.

In October 2015, the former Microsoft executive teamed up with the Vancouver Police Department in a public awareness campaign for bike theft prevention and recovery.

Source: Vancouver Police Department, 2015

According to Sgt. Randy Fincham of the Vancouver Police Department, the Log it, Lock it or Loose It   initiative is, “A fairly extensive public awareness

campaign encouraging owners to lock their bikes and record their serial numbers.”

Allard and the police have been holding workshops, distributing flyers, and talking to the public about how best to protect their bikes.

In the year that followed the campaign launch, there were 433 fewer bikes stolen in the city of 630,000 people, according to the City of Vancouver statistics.

HUB Cycling, a non-profit cycling advocacy group in Ottawa credits Allard’s partnership with the police for lessening thievery. “There’s wider increased awareness of bike theft being an issue across the city, I think that more people are cognisant to it now,” says Ellie Lambert, the communications director for the group.

Lambert notes the initiative’s emphasis on lock education, as the campaign has been promoting the best way to lock a bike and has introduced loaner locks at businesses for those who may have forgotten their locks at home.

Locks are important to Allard. “The harder you can make it for the thief, the more discouraged the thief will be, and move onto the next one,” says Allard, advocating for thick steel locks, “they take three minutes and sparks to remove.”

Common advice seems to be, leave the cable lock at home and invest in a more expensive, more durable variety.

The Log it, Lock it or Loose it campaign also encourages people to register their bikes with Allard’s database, Garage 529.

Allard says that Garage 529 is “a unified database for bycicles,” where users, bike shops, law enforcement and other organizations, like universities, can register bicycles.

People send in the bike’s serial numbers, a picture of the bike, make and model, date of purchase and ideally a picture of the owner with their bike. Then, if a bike goes missing, there’s a dossier for a police report, insurance claim, and for distribution on social media.

Garage 529 is also an app connected to the database, and if a bike is reported missing, any users within 15 kilometres of said disappearance get a notification on their phone.

“It’s like an amber alert system for bikes,” says Allard.

Still spinning from success in Vancouver, Allard is expanding his database in British Columbia, and is even in talks to bring the registry out east, to Toronto and Ottawa.

Source: City of Vancouver. The map above breaks down bike theft by neighbourhood, with the most bikes being stolen in and around the downtown core.