Shaggy
New Member
12-21-2021—How to recover stolen bike
From the original poster:
...we have existing technology (GPS tracking) that can make bike recovery doable. Lots of people get their bikes stolen and then offer rewards and spend hours scouring sites trying to find it being resold. If they instead spend a little bit on a tracker they have a much better shot. I'd love all the other major bike infrastructure/ecosystem things fixed too, but in the meantime this is a cheap half fix. The video obviously shows some of the other problems in SF, but just adding simple bike tracking is what I hoped to achieve.
We used the GPS tracker almost exclusively when we were tracking it down. It was constantly being updated and it gives you a history of where your tracker has been. The AirTag was 30 minutes late on realizing anything had happened. Which seems strange in SF, but the TL may not be as iPhone dense? The GPS tracker history was really handy for seeing that the bike was circling around the same area. With the AirTag there is no item history so you're sort of always looking at it with new eyes. If you can swing the price and hide it, I think the GPS tracker is the better theft recovery device. But... Airtags are so cheap that I think it makes sense to do both.
From the original poster:
...we have existing technology (GPS tracking) that can make bike recovery doable. Lots of people get their bikes stolen and then offer rewards and spend hours scouring sites trying to find it being resold. If they instead spend a little bit on a tracker they have a much better shot. I'd love all the other major bike infrastructure/ecosystem things fixed too, but in the meantime this is a cheap half fix. The video obviously shows some of the other problems in SF, but just adding simple bike tracking is what I hoped to achieve.
We used the GPS tracker almost exclusively when we were tracking it down. It was constantly being updated and it gives you a history of where your tracker has been. The AirTag was 30 minutes late on realizing anything had happened. Which seems strange in SF, but the TL may not be as iPhone dense? The GPS tracker history was really handy for seeing that the bike was circling around the same area. With the AirTag there is no item history so you're sort of always looking at it with new eyes. If you can swing the price and hide it, I think the GPS tracker is the better theft recovery device. But... Airtags are so cheap that I think it makes sense to do both.
