Bicycle Bill, your photo shows the waveform rack, and Tosch’s photo shows the staple rack. Eric Boucher’s photo shows what PDX just bought for the downtown transit mall’s project, but I’ve heard that cross section is prone to damaging paint, and caught a lot of flack from people who use them.
Too often they are they are too crowded because of how tight they pack bikes in. For the bikes using the upper part of the wave, they can be hard to secure your bike to due to the width/height of handlebars. Using the lower part, you have to lift a tire over the bar, which can be dificult due to the tight packing of other bikes, and when someone removes their adjacent bike, you have a possiblilty of your bike falling over and getting damaged. They just suck. Staple racks are pretty hard to overcrowd. Typically two bikes, occasionally four, but they aren’t packed to the point of damaging your (or other’s) ride.
Personally, I don’t like racks that rely on wheel-support. As Joe just demonstrated, they are an accident waiting to happen. I prefer to lean my bike against a lamppost or a telegraph pole or similar and run an unbreakable chain around the frame and the pole. I have a U-Lock that is strong and difficult to break, stops joy-riders etc. But the only way to stop a determined, prepared thief is to make the system unbreakable. Almost impossible against a determined and experienced thief! Psychology – any method used to steal an object makes the object unusable and destroys its value. Thus the majority of thieves are dissuaded. The one that only want a certain part of your bike is the one who will be careless about the damage, maybe, and is the one to be feared!
My foolproof method to stopping determined thieves is to ride either a beater or something that is the antithesis of cool. I rode a lovely fixie with drop bars, cool paint job, etc. for years and worried about thivery excessively. One day a shady looking teenager told me it was a “kewl fixie” I almost immediately installed North Road bars, brake levers, a chain guard, ring lock, racks front and rear, brass bell, and painted it a hideous hunter safety orange with rattle can Rustolium. It’s still a fixie, but in stealth mode and as uncool as can be. No interest on the part of would be thieves whatsoever. My other commuter bikes are all “Yehuded” out with similarly nasty looking rattle-canned paint jobs in road paint yellow or bile green. Nice components, but not lookers by any stretch. No thief looks at them twice, I’d bet.
I’m with you on this – my commuter is “the ratbike”, covered in reflective tape and a good layer of road dirt. I keep the moving parts working well, of course, but everything else stays grubby – the Campag Record front hub and Phil Wood rear are more or less unidentifiable beneath the greasy layers!
The only way to stop a determined, prepared thief is to: A. Have your bike in your workspace (shopping area, etc.) with you, or, B. Ride something so absolutely crappy that he’ll go look for something more desirable to steal (assuming that’s possible, of course).
Syke is correct, although sometimes “A” just isn’t a possibility. As for “B”, who really wants to ride a crappy bike?
Fortunately most bike thieves are opportunists and will generally rip off that which can be taken quickly and easily (note I said most, not all). Make it too difficult to take, either by locking it with a good lock or locking it in a place where an attempt to cut/break the lock would be immediately apparent (or both!), and your average thief will bypass your ride for an easier target.
With a basket on front and rack plus trunk on back, with fat cruiser tires, I find these racks nearly useless. Some can be used to hold the front wheel straight while it’s on the kickstand and I can run a lock cable through wheel and frame. Mostly I like to lean against a pole or similar. If i was building a store and wanted to make room for bikes, I’d fasten a series of upright braces on the wall about six feet apart and let people lean up against them to lock up.
The staple racks give me the shivers. 30 seconds with a wrench and it’s off the pavement and the bike is gone. If the city decides to weld the nuts (haven’t seen them do it yet) then it’s 60 seconds with a grinder. Waveforms at least have a little meat to them and at least here they are actually cemented into the ground. The tall wheel benders are ok for the reasons eric mentions. The short wheel benders are the ones I find useless or at best extremely inconvenient if you don’t have a cable.
Over here they’re called Sheffield stands, and also come in concreted-in versions.
The fact is that there’s no such things as a theft-proof bike. When you lock your bike anywhere, all you can hope to do is make your bike less attractive than the competition. That means a good lock, securing the easily removable high-value parts (wheels, saddle), and as Dale says, don’t have the most blinged up bike in the rack.
As an aside, is Joe having a little marriage trouble at home? First he’s on the recumbent guy and now he’s smashing bikes. Seems like he has a lot of agression lately.
I just had to get creative when visiting a riding buddy in the hopital who crashed over the weekend (btw, GET A ROAD ID–DON’T LEAVE HOME WITHOUT IT). Anyway, I didn’t have a lock, and they had the wave-form bike racks. So I did the only thing I could think of: I loosened the seat clamp, collapsed the seat, rolled it under the top of the wave, re-extended/retightened, and pocketed my bike tool. When I came back all was well, though someone did pinch my bottle cage. This will not work with a quick-release, of course, but it worked in a pinch for me. I can live with losing the bottle cage if it means keeping the bike!
I used the so-called “wheel bender” racks for many years and never had a bent wheel. I’d still use them if they were available, but these days it’s rare to see a rack of any kind (I only know of one rack anywhere near where I live).
Now if I could only get the city of Beaverton (Oregon) to enforce it’s no waveform racks (we’re supposed to use staples)
Please explain. Waveform racks = these? http://www.jaypro.com/Images/Products/500×500/Wave_Bicycle_Rack.jpg
And what do you mean by “staples”?
I think he means these
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3511/3217892775_5da123cd95.jpg
Leipzig (Germany) advocates those: http://www.leipzig.de/imperia/md/images/01-4_medien_kommunik_stadtb/news/090526_fahrrad_604.jpg
House owners can buy these racks, the city pays for installing them.
Avoid the circular cross section. They are easily cut by pipe cutters.
Bicycle Bill, your photo shows the waveform rack, and Tosch’s photo shows the staple rack. Eric Boucher’s photo shows what PDX just bought for the downtown transit mall’s project, but I’ve heard that cross section is prone to damaging paint, and caught a lot of flack from people who use them.
What’s wrong with the wave racks? So long as the cross section isn’t too fat for my U-lock to fit around, anyway.
Too often they are they are too crowded because of how tight they pack bikes in.
For the bikes using the upper part of the wave, they can be hard to secure your bike to due to the width/height of handlebars. Using the lower part, you have to lift a tire over the bar, which can be dificult due to the tight packing of other bikes, and when someone removes their adjacent bike, you have a possiblilty of your bike falling over and getting damaged. They just suck. Staple racks are pretty hard to overcrowd. Typically two bikes, occasionally four, but they aren’t packed to the point of damaging your (or other’s) ride.
Personally, I don’t like racks that rely on wheel-support.
As Joe just demonstrated, they are an accident waiting to happen.
I prefer to lean my bike against a lamppost or a telegraph pole or similar and run an unbreakable chain around the frame and the pole. I have a U-Lock that is strong and difficult to break, stops joy-riders etc. But the only way to stop a determined, prepared thief is to make the system unbreakable. Almost impossible against a determined and experienced thief!
Psychology – any method used to steal an object makes the object unusable and destroys its value. Thus the majority of thieves are dissuaded.
The one that only want a certain part of your bike is the one who will be careless about the damage, maybe, and is the one to be feared!
My foolproof method to stopping determined thieves is to ride either a beater or something that is the antithesis of cool. I rode a lovely fixie with drop bars, cool paint job, etc. for years and worried about thivery excessively. One day a shady looking teenager told me it was a “kewl fixie” I almost immediately installed North Road bars, brake levers, a chain guard, ring lock, racks front and rear, brass bell, and painted it a hideous hunter safety orange with rattle can Rustolium. It’s still a fixie, but in stealth mode and as uncool as can be. No interest on the part of would be thieves whatsoever. My other commuter bikes are all “Yehuded” out with similarly nasty looking rattle-canned paint jobs in road paint yellow or bile green. Nice components, but not lookers by any stretch. No thief looks at them twice, I’d bet.
I’m with you on this – my commuter is “the ratbike”, covered in reflective tape and a good layer of road dirt. I keep the moving parts working well, of course, but everything else stays grubby – the Campag Record front hub and Phil Wood rear are more or less unidentifiable beneath the greasy layers!
The only way to stop a determined, prepared thief is to: A. Have your bike in your workspace (shopping area, etc.) with you, or, B. Ride something so absolutely crappy that he’ll go look for something more desirable to steal (assuming that’s possible, of course).
Syke is correct, although sometimes “A” just isn’t a possibility. As for “B”, who really wants to ride a crappy bike?
Fortunately most bike thieves are opportunists and will generally rip off that which can be taken quickly and easily (note I said most, not all). Make it too difficult to take, either by locking it with a good lock or locking it in a place where an attempt to cut/break the lock would be immediately apparent (or both!), and your average thief will bypass your ride for an easier target.
Wouldn’t a bike thief steal a pice of cr@p as to not draw a lot of attention??? nah… not that smart!
Theives are looking for resale value, not an anonymous ride.
The proper technique for locking up on one of these racks is to throw the whole front fork over the top of the rack.
Like this.
http://www.carectomy.com/images/image/POST%20rack%202(1).jpg
Thumbs up for that mixte. And stylishly parked too.
Ahhh … great idea. Easy to lock wheel to frame that way.
With a basket on front and rack plus trunk on back, with fat cruiser tires, I find these racks nearly useless. Some can be used to hold the front wheel straight while it’s on the kickstand and I can run a lock cable through wheel and frame. Mostly I like to lean against a pole or similar. If i was building a store and wanted to make room for bikes, I’d fasten a series of upright braces on the wall about six feet apart and let people lean up against them to lock up.
The staple racks give me the shivers. 30 seconds with a wrench and it’s off the pavement and the bike is gone. If the city decides to weld the nuts (haven’t seen them do it yet) then it’s 60 seconds with a grinder. Waveforms at least have a little meat to them and at least here they are actually cemented into the ground. The tall wheel benders are ok for the reasons eric mentions. The short wheel benders are the ones I find useless or at best extremely inconvenient if you don’t have a cable.
Over here they’re called Sheffield stands, and also come in concreted-in versions.
The fact is that there’s no such things as a theft-proof bike. When you lock your bike anywhere, all you can hope to do is make your bike less attractive than the competition. That means a good lock, securing the easily removable high-value parts (wheels, saddle), and as Dale says, don’t have the most blinged up bike in the rack.
I think using an angle grinder in the middle of the sidewalk would tend to attract a bit too much of the wrong kind of attention for a thief…
As an aside, is Joe having a little marriage trouble at home? First he’s on the recumbent guy and now he’s smashing bikes. Seems like he has a lot of agression lately.
I just had to get creative when visiting a riding buddy in the hopital who crashed over the weekend (btw, GET A ROAD ID–DON’T LEAVE HOME WITHOUT IT). Anyway, I didn’t have a lock, and they had the wave-form bike racks. So I did the only thing I could think of: I loosened the seat clamp, collapsed the seat, rolled it under the top of the wave, re-extended/retightened, and pocketed my bike tool. When I came back all was well, though someone did pinch my bottle cage. This will not work with a quick-release, of course, but it worked in a pinch for me. I can live with losing the bottle cage if it means keeping the bike!
I used the so-called “wheel bender” racks for many years and never had a bent wheel. I’d still use them if they were available, but these days it’s rare to see a rack of any kind (I only know of one rack anywhere near where I live).