How America is beating the bike criminals faster than the UK
Stats show US riders lose a bike to thieves once every 50 years
‘Bikes here are five times more likely to be stolen’
Despite recent advances in the war against bike theft, the UK is still massively lagging behind other countries including our pals over the other side of the pond. The National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB) in America have just published their latest statistics on how many motorcycles were stolen in 2019, coming in at just over 40,000 bikes. That’s down from 46,000 a little more than four years ago. Good for them, you might think.
The UK has also had successes in reducing bike crime – based on whose stats you use (because our way of reporting motorcycle theft is notoriously patchy) our overall bike theft peaked in recent years at just over 38,000 and it’s now believed to be down to around 28,000. That seems alright until you take a closer look at the numbers. There are in the region of 1.2 million motorcycles on the road in the UK (that are taxed and insured), compared to around 8.8 million in the US. That means in the US, there’s a 0.45% chance your bike will be stolen in a given year. Whereas in the UK, there’s a 2.3% chance – nearly five times as bad. Things get worse once you factor in what happens after the theft, too.
Again, the stats vary depending on type of bike, location (and who you ask!) but recovery rates in the UK hover around 20%, so of the 28,000 bikes stolen per year just 5600 will be recovered. Fitting a tracker massively increases the likelihood of recovery and the stats don’t tell us how many of the recovered bikes were fitted with the devices, but if you take that into account the chance of getting a stolen bike back without a tracker is slim. Compare that to the US though and it’s a different picture, where over half of all stolen bikes are returned. So that 0.45% chance of losing your bike each year is closer to 0.23% when you factor in recoveries. That means cumulatively, Amercian riders would need to ride for nearly 50 years before losing a bike to a thief, compared to 20 years here in the UK.