STOP (BICYCLE) THIEF!
Ex-microsoft wunderkind goes on Canadian crusade to save your bike
Rob Brunt was having a hard time picking an outfit. He had a meeting to get to and, as a Vancouver police officer, he was often in uniform, which did not seem like a good fit, not for a face-to-face with J (James) Allard, a former megastar at Microsoft Corp. and the so-called father of the Xbox gaming console.
A suit and tie didn’t seem right either, so Brunt struck what he viewed as a compromise between being too dressy, and not dressy enough, and arrived five minutes early at The Rocky Bottom Brewery in Bellevue, Wash., in a collared shirt, fancy jeans and polished dress shoes.
“I made sure I got there first,” he said, “and then I see J walking in, and he is wearing a hoodie, torn-up shorts, skater shoes and a ball cap. He was the answer to my prayers.”
Allard is a beer-drinking, pizza-eating, bicycle-loving genius, and the ultimate anti-tech bro, whose nascent post-microsoft mission, isn’t birthing the next Silicon Valley unicorn, but declaring all-out digital war on bike theft.
Brunt, known around Vancouver policing circles as “the bike detective,” saw Allard as a winning ticket, exactly the kind of tech-savvy sidekick he had been seeking for months.
But for Allard, known around tech circles — and even by his mom — merely as J, the Canadian city the cop hailed from was the perfect laboratory to further test drive 529 Garage: a free, smartphone app/ online bike registry intended to unite cyclists, bike-shop owners and police in a multi-pillared community effort to reduce a crime that impacts an estimated two million North American cyclists annually to the tune of $650 million.
“We weren’t planning on Canada,” Allard said. “But then Rob called me.”
It is a good thing he did, too: In the four years since Allard and Brunt’s beer-and-pizza summit in Bellevue, the number of reported bike thefts in Vancouver is down nearly 40 per cent, to about 1,800 from 3,068, according to police statistics, while the app itself has caught fire among B.C. cyclists, and now boasts 100,000 users provincewide while also migrating east, with Red Deer, Alta., Brandon, Man., Regina, Guelph, Ont. and Ottawa all signing on in recent months.
To register a bike, users input its model, colour, make and serial number and upload several photos showing them with the bike. If the bike gets stolen, the victim issues an alert and an electronic all-points, bike-theft bulletin is then sent to any app user within a 15-kilometre radius of the crime — plus bike shops and the police.
If police then seize or recover a bike, they can check it against the registry and the photos, and if there is a match, bingo, the bike gets returned to its rightful owner, a joyous reunion that hardly ever occurs in other major cities such as Toronto these days.
The Toronto Police Service’s Property and Video Management Unit building in the city’s northeast corner is among the saddest addresses in town for a bike lover. Picture a big-box store, only with shelf after shelf after shelf of stolen and recovered or seized goods. Beer, booze, blackjack tables, a dentist’s chair, and, at one end of the facility, near several plastic barrels crammed with old rifles, thousands of bikes in orderly rows.
Some of the bikes are dusty with rusted chains and warped tires. Most are brand names in good condition.
Abel Dasilva, acting police supervisor in charge of the bike collection, grew up in west end Toronto where his first bike was a blue BMX. Someone stole it from his backyard. “I learned to ride on that bike,” he said, wistfully. Dasilva never saw that bike again, and most of the bikes he oversees today go unclaimed.
After 37 days (in theory), they get shipped to Police Auctions Canada, a police charity, and sold to the highest bidder. In other words, if you are in Toronto and looking for your stolen bike, it is possible the police are the middlemen between the bike being found and the bike being sold to someone else.
“When all your officers are tied up on scenes for homicides, for shootings, for stuff like that, it kind of takes your resources away from doing bike-theft investigations,” said Scott Mills, social media officer with Toronto police.
Bike theft simply can’t compete with gangs, guns, murders, robberies and assaults, even though stolen bikes are a key spoke in the urban crime web.
Thieves, said Brunt, the bike detective who was a beat cop on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside for more than two decades, don’t drive cars; they steal bikes, using them as getaway rides from break-ins. Stolen bikes are also street currency and easily traded for drugs. An organized dealer can have a lucrative side business selling hot bikes on Craigslist. Arrests are rare.
Allard wasn’t thinking about bike crime when he left Microsoft in 2010, at least not until his yellow, custom downhill mountain bike got swiped from a secure parking garage in Seattle.
“I’ve owned at least 30 bikes in my lifetime and had about five stolen,” he said. “But it was really the last one that got me fired up enough to do something.”
Allard reported the theft of that bike to Seattle police. His friends circulated the news (and images of the stolen bike) on social media. He waited 30 days until he got a call from a friend telling him his bike was on ebay. The police told him they don’t investigate “ebay crimes,” while encouraging him to bid on the bike, which he did, noting that the seller was also auctioning several laptops, Home Depot gift cards, a high-end camera lens and a bunch of ipods.
For reasons unknown, the bike was abruptly pulled from the auction site, so Allard bought a laptop from the seller instead. Using his tech smarts, he sifted through the hard drive and found its rightful owner’s name.
After Allard turned several more somersaults, the police finally went to the seller’s home and seized his yellow bike, but they wouldn’t return it to him unless he provided a serial number, which he didn’t have. Ultimately, he found it, because he knew everybody with a similar custom downhill mountain bike since they all rode together.
In the end, the mother-of-allbike-recovery missions had planted a seed: Here was a problem Allard wanted to fix.
“Anywhere between 30 and 50 per cent of your cycling friends will have a bike theft story,” he said. “I hated that it became normalized in the cycling culture, but more so, that theft is a meaningful deterrent from getting new riders to adopt the mode. We need less congestion. We need less obesity. We need better mental health. We need more moments to slow down. We need sparks of joy from our childhood.”
The 50-year-old has attacked that issue with the same missionary zeal that was the stuff of legend during his 19-year run at Microsoft. Scott Henson, a senior executive who overlapped 15 of those years, was witness, as he describes it, “to the comet streak across the sky.”
It was Allard who, as a young gun in the early 1990s, recognized the internet as a game-changer and urged his superiors, by way of an eloquent, internally circulated 16-page memo, to get with the program. It was a similar story with the Xbox. Allard and Bill Gates, meanwhile, became like “two peas in a pod,” Henson said.
After Xbox launched in 2001, Allard shut himself in his office, handwriting thank you notes to a team of 300-plus. Each note included details specific to the individual it was addressed to.
“Most executives wouldn’t do that,” Henson said. “I still have my note.”
The difference in getting behind a niche industry such as bike theft, however, is that Allard isn’t some big shot at a trillion-dollar company with troops to muster and all the necessary resources to spend. He is co-founder of a small startup, with a partner, Lara Ferroni, in Washington, D.C., an employee in Chicago and a cop buddy named Rob in B.C.
Allard is originally from Glens Falls, N.Y., about three hours south of Montreal. Home now is Bellingham, Wash., where he does all the graphics for the 529 Garage app and web pages, resets user passwords, blogs, provides tech support to client cities, does outreach at public events and responds to about 350 emails daily. The app now has 1.5 million registered users, and is rooted in several U.S. cities, including Portland, Ore., as well as several Canadian cities.
A curious thing about Allard is that he may have earned boatloads of cash at Microsoft, but he isn’t remotely motivated by it. “There is nothing wrong with being a boot-strapping CEO,” Allard said. “But it’s been six years now.”
Part of the problem is the potential client base. It took Brunt three months to get 529 Garage up and running in Vancouver, and that was with the chief’s blessing and the bureaucracy on board.
In Toronto, conversations are years in. But Allard hasn’t lost heart yet. It is just a matter of time until more cities embrace his lowcost fix for bike theft.