Worried about keeping your bike from being stolen? There’s an app for that. Or at least there is if you living in Vancouver, B.C. And it’s cut bike thefts there by 30% since being adopted two years ago.
According to CBC News, Vancouver officials adopted a Portland-based app called Project 529 Garage in October 2015 that lets citizens register their bikes and report it when they get stolen. Since then about 22,000 bicycle owners have registered their bikes with it in the city.
Users download the app, get a serial number tag for their bike and create a bike profile that gets uploaded to the app database. If your bike gets stolen, you just hit a stolen bike alert button and app users within several kilometres get an alert on their phones about your bike. Bike shops are also notified. Many app users are also putting stickers with the name of the app on their bikes, alerting thieves that the bike can is registered, which may be a deterrent to criminals who have a hard time getting the decal off if they want to re-sell the bike at a pawn shop or on Craigslist.