The Made-in-vancouver Solution that can Protect Your Bike
The creator of the Xbox and a cop have proven they can address bike theft with Project 529
J Allard and Det. Rob Brunt have found that beating the crooks might be easier than overcoming the challenges that are holding back their program
Two men who have figured out how to stop bike theft are in California. They are pitching their idea. They have spent months selling their plan all over North America, presenting it to anybody who will listen: bike-shop owners, cycling advocates and police officers. Cops are the most important. They are the linchpins of the idea. The duo has pitched it to police forces in cities all over the continent – Seattle, Portland, Phoenix, Victoria, even Bogota, Colombia. Late last year, they found themselves in San Francisco doing the same thing.
Pitching like this is difficult. Both men were worn out from the travel and the energy the pitch requires. But with an amenable San Francisco cop listening, they dove in. The two men play off each other during the pitch. One is an icon of the technology industry, a fast talker with nuclear troves of energy who dazzles with techno-speak and moon-shot visions. The other is a veteran beat cop, a streetwise operator who understands the system and has little patience for nonsense. It was a good pitch and it went well. The audience seemed open. Thanks for bringing it to us, the duo heard. It’s great work you’re doing. A real benefit to the city. I’ll bring it to the brass and see what we can do. They all shook hands. The duo walked away. Exhausted, they headed to a nearby pub for a celebratory beer.
The techie’s name is J Allard. He’s wiry and bald, often in a T-shirt and flat-brim ball cap pulled to his eyebrows. He was an executive at Microsoft for years. He led the team that built the Xbox. He’s in press photos alongside Bill Gates. His departure from Microsoft made the tech news. Allard crackles in conversation. His words come fast, animated with head thrusts and hand movements. Things really pick up when he talks about the time his bike was stolen. Allard is a mountain biker. For a time, he owned a home in Whistler, B.C., to facilitate this passion. Once, at his home in Seattle, he packed for a trip. He mounted his bike to his vehicle, locked it and went to bed, ready to leave the next day. When he came out in the morning, the bike was gone.
The theft angered him, but what followed struck him on a deeper level. He called the cops and filled out a police report. And that was it. That didn’t sit well with Allard. So he researched. He looked at the ways police investigate theft, and how they deal with recovered bikes. He dug up statistics and examined how officials in different jurisdictions deal with the problem. He checked out bike shops and bike manufacturers. The more he learned, the more exasperated he became. For someone wired to solve problems, bike theft bothered him: the way police handle the crime, the attitudes, the indifference, the disconnections and jurisdictional issues. Most of all, he couldn’t fathom why nobody was doing anything to fix the problem. “A lot of people say, ‘Bike theft is small potatoes, so why bother?’ But it’s not,” Allard says. “It’s about your community. It’s about your quality of life. You can say, ‘This is OK,’ or you can say, ‘This is bullshit.’ I call bullshit.”
The cop is Det. Rob Brunt. He’s worked for 25 years as a street cop in Vancouver. In 2014, he was assigned to desk duty while recovering from an automobile collision. Around that time, the Vancouver Police Department had opened a new facility for dealing with recovered stolen bikes. Curious, Brunt went to check it out. It was huge. It had a three-storey, motorized rotating storage device that housed 500. Three hundred more bikes were on the ground. At the time, Vancouver was the worst city in North America for bike theft. Nine bikes a day were stolen. Some years, the Vancouver Police Department recovered 2,500 bikes and, because they couldn’t find the owners, auctioned 2,400 of them. Brunt got talking to one of the civilians who worked at the new facility. “I say to the guy, ‘Who’s behind this work? Whose job is it to get these bicycles back to their owners?’” Brunt asked. The answer was a shrug.
During Brunt’s years working on the bike-patrol unit in Vancouver, he learned that bike theft was a constant on the street. It’s a nearly perfect urban crime. Stolen bikes are their own getaway vehicles. They are easy to ditch in a pinch. They are easy to sell for a quick buck. The chances of being caught are low. Furthermore, Brunt came to subscribe to a theory that, like the famous brokenwindow theory, bike theft begets further crime. “One of the things I noticed being a young cop was that the bad guys aren’t driving Trans Ams or Camaros like on television,” he says. “They are hiding in the shadows riding bikes.”
As Brunt looked more deeply into bike theft, he learned that it wasn’t just a problem in Vancouver, it was everywhere. Data from 2019 puts the number of bikes stolen in North America at more than two million a year, that’s one every 15 seconds. It costs society $1 billion a year. Some research suggests that seven per cent of victims stop cycling completely. Of those who continue, 20 per cent buy a cheaper replacement bike. So Brunt put together a proposal to create an online bike registry in Vancouver and pitched the chief. To his surprise, the chief said yes. Not knowing where to start, Brunt thought he’d see how other Canadian police forces managed their bike registries. But almost nobody had an online version. Then it dawned on him: “What have I gotten myself into?”
Allard and Brunt met at exactly the right time. During Brunt’s search for a city that was operating a bike registry, he was referred to Allard, who had launched Project 529 in 2013, funded by the sale of his vacation home in Whistler. The project contained an online bike registry called 529 Garage that he thought would help fill the need for a global registry. So Brunt looked up Allard online. “I said, ‘Holy crap, he’s not just a Microsoft guy. He invented the Xbox.’” Brunt arranged to meet Allard at a Vancouver pub. Since the cop was about to meet a tech-industry powerhouse, Brunt wore a nice dress shirt. Allard walked in wearing a hoodie, blue jeans and Nikes. “I thought, This is my kind of guy,” Brunt says.
In Allard, Brunt found a tech-savvy problem solver with big ideas and persuasiveness. In Brunt, Allard found an expert in crime and prevention who was connected to an amenable police force. Together, they knew they had to go deeper than an online registry, which only helps after a bike is stolen. They wanted to prevent thefts in the first place. So they spoke with everyone in Vancouver they could think of who might have some insight – bike-shop owners, business district operators, community associations and victims.
Focusing first on Granville Island, a market and tourist hotspot and the worst place in Vancouver for bike thefts, the pair built a community approach to stopping the problem, centred around their digital registry. Dozens of stakeholders got involved. Bike racks were relocated to visible areas. Retailers offered complimentary loaner bike locks. Campaigns were launched to encourage people to register their bikes. Badges to identify registered bikes were sold as deterrents. Allard personally upgraded sales software at bike shops to simplify the registration of new bikes. And it worked. Between 2015 and 2017, the number of bikes stolen at Granville Island fell from 151 to 56. As the program expanded throughout the city, the number of thefts fell correspondingly.
But bike theft is not a problem restricted by city boundaries. Untold numbers of bikes stolen in Vancouver, for example, were shipped across the U.S. border and resold in Seattle. Tracking them was almost impossible. Both men knew Allard’s original vision of a global bike registry was key, so their work couldn’t stop in Vancouver. The entire Project 529 community approach needed to be implemented everywhere.
Their success prompted Vancouver’s police chief to
“A lot of people say, ‘Bike theft is small potatoes, so why bother?’ But it’s not. It’s about your community. It’s about your quality of life.”
agree to loan Brunt to the program. Allard and Brunt developed a pitch – a “Bert-and-ernie routine,” they joke – and hit the road. They targeted bike shops, bike manufacturers and bike-advocacy groups. But based on their experience in Vancouver, they knew the program’s success was dependent on commitment from the police. They needed a Brunt in every city. In dozens of places, they found them: well-meaning cops who understood the problem and the solution. The response was almost universally positive. They now have partners in police departments in Ottawa, Regina, Brandon, Man., and throughout B.C. Yet, after most pitches, nothing happens.
The problem was that solving bike theft is hard. There’s no easy tech fix. It’s not scalable. Every city is slightly different. Independent bike shops tend to operate differently, use different sales software and different methods of tracking bikes. There needs to be a long-term, sustained commitment from the entire community, and it needs to be led by the police. And that’s what proved to be the obstacle.
Over and over again, they heard the same thing. Receptive cops took the idea back to their bosses and it died. There weren’t enough resources. No police officer could be spared to run the program. Funding was short. It wasn’t a priority. In some cities, citizens raised money to launch the program, but even that was not enough to get the police on board.
Being stymied while so tantalizingly close to a solution frustrates Allard and Brunt. In some ways, it would be easier if there was a more tangible enemy to battle. But when the problems are a system, an attitude and inertia, it’s difficult to find easy fixes. “I still believe that this is the right approach, but I’ve learned that passion can’t trump bureaucracy,” Allard says. “Logically, this should be everywhere. We have the evidence. We just have to get past the bureaucracy.”
The slow adoption of the program has created new enemies for Allard and Brunt: time and money. Setting up such programs, even when everybody is on board, can take years. In the summer of 2019, 529 Garage had registered more than a million bikes, but expanding the broader theft-prevention program into new cities requires old-fashioned legwork, which is expensive. “We could put $3 million to work tomorrow if we had it,” Allard says. It pains Brunt that so much of the program remains funded by Allard personally.
But being so close to a solution is also what keeps the duo going. “Whether you’re in Prince George or Bogota, you see the same thing. People want a fix to this problem,” Brunt says. “It’s amazing when it works. We’re shining a light to give people the ability to make a change. When I see that, it restores my faith in humanity.”
Back in California, the pitch had gone well, but the duo had learned to temper their enthusiasm after positive meetings. Too often their pitch goes swimmingly, but the idea fails does go any further. As they sat down at the pub, despondent and exhausted, Allard noticed a bike shop down the street they had never visited before. The techie and the cop looked at each other, stood up and left the pub, beers still on the table, and headed toward the bike shop to make their pitch.