Report (2020)

In 2018 I stumbled upon the Toronto Police Service’s published datasets and as an avid cyclist in the city I was naturally curious about the bicycle thefts that happen in the city. I dug through the data (that can be found here) and I wrote a report on my findings back then.

It’s been two years since I last looked at the data and after someone from CycleTO reached out, I thought this would be a great time to make an updated report with data from 2018 and 2019.

Note: the data presented only reflects reported crimes, which may not reflect actual bicycle-related crime in the city

Neighbourhoods

Each crime is listed with the neighbourhood of where the crime occurred! Waterfront Communities - The Island comes in first place with 2271 reported incidents over 6 years and Maple Leaf comes in last with only 5. In the 2018 report Waterfront Communities - The Island had less than 1400 crimes and Maple Leaf had 7 (somehow this value decreased by 2)

Below is a plot of number of crimes by neighbourhood – double click to zoom out and drag your mouse to zoom in on a window

In the two years since I last looked at the data, it seems the worst 10 neighbourhoods have not changed except for their order. Notably: Niagara went from 9th worst to 4th worst and Bay Street Corridor overtook Church-Yonge corridor for 2nd.

Couldn’t find the neighbourhood you were interested? A full list of neighbourhoods can be found here.

Maps

Below is a heatmap of the reported crimes, by neighbourhood

Looking to see if your stolen bicycle was properly reported? Here is a scatter plot of all reported crimes

If you guess that your bicycle is safer at home rather than locked on the street somewhere – you’re wrong (if you live in an apartment or condo). 21.2% of all bicycle thefts occur in apartments (and condos) vs. 21% which occur on streets. Of course, not all thefts are occuring in your apartment/condo unit, it’s likely that these thefts are happening in bicycle rooms or racks on premises. This proportion has increased since the 2018 report where only 17.7% of thefts happened in apartments/condos and 22.7% occured on the street.

Time Data

The number of thefts that occur per year has increased steadily year by year up until 2019, this could be because:

1. bicycle thefts have gone down (🎉),
2. people are reporting fewer thefts, or
3. not all data has been entered for 2019.

Either way, these are troubling figures because this means there are greater than 10 thefts per day on average, every year

Do you know when your bicycle is most likely to be stolen? You might think your bicycle is less safe locked during the night but that is not necessarily be true.

The plot below shows that there are way more thefts during the day than overnight, however because the data only shows reported crimes, this data is skewed to be biased towards daytime crimes.

There are peaks at around 9 AM, 12 PM and 6 PM (corresponding to morning commute, lunch, and evening commute), this is likely because those are the times when people are most likely to notice that their bike has gone missing, again emphasizing the fact that this is only reported data. (This distribution has not changed significantly since 2018)

Bicycle-related thefts spike during the warmer months and slow down during the winter, which makes sense due to lower ridership. The 1-month period with the most reported crimes was July 2018 with 642, or about 20 per day! (up from the previous peak in July 2017 with 591) It will be interesting to see if the ongoing (as of writing) coronavirus pandemic will have an affect on 2020 numbers.

Cost

So how much is this theft costing us? Over six years of data, the reported cost of stolen bikes sums up to $18,804,580 or roughly $3.13 million per year! With $3.13 million you can:

1. buy 745,238 Big Macs,
2. pay for the City of Toronto’s New Affordable Housing Development budget (twice), or
3. get 2 Lysol wipes from Pusateri’s

The average value of a stolen bike was calculated to be approximately $937.97, which seems high (up from $907.95 in 2018). This could either mean there are a lot of “low value” bicycle thefts that aren’t being reported by their owners or people may be over-reporting the value of their bikes in hopes that the police will take it more seriously.

Of the $18 million of stolen bicycles, $176,686.71 has been recovered, which is quite disappointing and discouraging to find out.

Below is histogram showing the cost of stolen bicycles throughout Toronto, separated in $100 buckets:

double click to zoom out and drag your mouse to zoom in on a window

Prevention and Recovery

Now here’s the part where I nag at you:

Do you know what your bicycle’s serial number is? Or where to find it? Knowing the serial number to your bicycle is essential to recovering it if it gets stolen. Between 2014 and 2019 there were approximately 20,000 reported bicycle crimes and only 1.17% of stolen bicycles were able to be recovered (this has decreased by 0.1% since 2018). Your chances of recovering your stolen bike are very, very slim so don’t rely on it!

If you want to have a chance of getting your bike back after it’s stolen, please register your bike with the Toronto Police here. Your serial number can typically be found on the bottom of your bike, under the bottom bracket shell. Hopefully Toronto might get something like Project 529 where victims can post an alert to fellow cyclists to look out for stolen bikes.

To secure your bike better, consider getting a U-Lock, they are way sturdier than cable locks and are worth it keep your bike safe. Sheldon Brown has a great webpage on lock-strategy. GCN has a very good video as well.