A quality bicycle can be a big investment and little is worse than that investment vanishing at the hands of theives.”Most bicycles are stolen from places owners assume are safe,” NationalBikeRegistry.com reminds us. “Experienced thieves can take even locked bikes in about 10-20 seconds. Bolt cutters will cut most chains and cables, and U-style locks are broken by inserting scissors-style car jack inside the U and cranking. In most U.S. cities, bicycle-theft rings are organized to steal bikes and sell them on the street, at flea markets, and to receivers of stolen goods, i.e. fences. Within the drug trade, stolen bicycles are so common they can almost be used as currency.”
Police property rooms are reported to be full of recovered bikes unfortunately without any identification to tie them to their original owner. Enter National Bike Registry. With a searchable nationwide database established in 1984, bike owners can register their bicycle by its manufacturer’s serial number, and police can also search the database by that code as well as make, model, color, and frame size. In the event that the bike is stolen, it provides a quick and easy way to identify it and prove ownership. Law enforcement officials enter the recovered bike’s sticker number into the database to notify NBR your bike has been recovered, who in turn notifies you.
Participants can register online, by phone at 800-848-BIKE, or print out the registration form and send it with a check, to NBR by mail. Once your information has been entered into the NBR database, we will send you a Certificate of Registration and an engineered, tamper-proof label to apply to your bike. Multiple tiers are available, all of them affordable, including:
- $10 for 10 years of coverage for an individual bike
- $25 for 30 years Registration allows you to transfer your registration when you replace your bike. Notify NBR and we will change the information in our database and send you a new certificate and label. This registration is limited to one bike at a time and valid for 30 years.
- $25 Family Registration will cover up to 5 bicycles located at a single address. Each bicycle will have 10 years of coverage.
The NBR doesn’t guarantee recovery, but it does keep your information in the database until it’s recovered, as well as provide registration of a new bike as long as the stolen one is still missing. — Casandra Armour
