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Cyclists ignorance about bike theft and our awful budgeting schemes are precipitating the crazy amounts of bike theft we bitch about all the time

It's time to take control. So here's a response that I spammed somebody's post about bike registration with. They were talking about registering your bike with police, not stupid cyclist registration stuff. Registering your frame and the serial number and whatever so if it gets stolen you can deal with it. And so you can prove it's yours. It's complicated. I'm not gonna be able to write about it perfectly. If you care, you're going to have to negotiate a shitload of words. It's gonna take longer to read this article than it would to register your fucking bicycle. But it is all interesting sociological stuff. So let's do this. So here's what I wrote on Facebook. Consider it an intro: People have a kind of limited idea of what bike theft is like too, so they don't realize there's all these bikes sitting around out there that have been stolen and then abandoned somewhere else by the thief. Not for a joyride but because the best use o...

Trips under 5km my ass, 17k a day is normal! City of Toronto better wake up.

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When people are like "you biked here?!?" their look of shock, I love it :D "wow you're a real serious cyclist then" that kind of bums me out a bit, because basically they're saying "I'm not doing that." Anyway. This "trips under 5km" bullshit has got to stop. The city keeps pushing it and it's a great excuse to keep the junctions between our 'hoods impassible. Like these pieces of garbage: Those are your choices if you want to cross this one set of train tracks, anywhere between Ray and Dundas. That's a 6km wide barrier to cyclists going east-west through the west end. Thanks a lot, City of Toronto! We know you hate us but what is so offensive about us crossing your tracks? This is the end result of all this "trips under 5k talk." Limiting our trips to 5k, and the 5k that the city decides to allow us to work within! So what are police telling cyclists when we go in to ask what the safe...