Toronto Bicycle Thefts

Are you sure you want to purchase a bicycle in Toronto?

Chenning Yang

November 18, 2022

oronto, a prosperous city, has a busy commute every day. Riding a bicycle can greatly benefit commuters by avoiding traffic jams on the way to work and saving more commuting time. Also, as the food delivery industry considerably developed, various types of bicycles, such as scooters and electric bicycles, have become popular in public.

This article aims to explore how bicycle theft cases behave in Toronto based on location types, time slots, areas, bicycle types, etc., from the data provided by the Toronto Public Service. Throughout the article, we will provide some insights and tips to those who intend to use bicycles frequently in Toronto. The article also seeks to contribute practical conclusions and inspiration for authorities to help reduce the occurrence of such incidents.

Bike thefts: A serious issue in Toronto

Initially, the number of bike thefts in Toronto has been seriously increasing on average recently. Figure1 indicates the trend of bike thefts, and the average of bike thefts is 3597 from 2014 to 2019. In 2019, due to the intervention of COVID-19, there was a significant drop in bicycle theft as personnel commuting dropped significantly. Before that, the amount of theft was increasing year by year. According to Global News, bike thefts have risen to around 4000 in 2020, bothering people about where and how they can park their bicycles safer beyond their sights. Nevertheless, bike thefts declined to a certain extent because of the pandemic lockdown and people hung out less at that time.

In addition, some neighborhoods (highlighted in Figure 2) in Toronto were drawn to our attention for analysis due to high incidences of bike thefts. The article only focuses on these painful areas, and hopefully, more valuable conclusions can be drawn. The article is structured mainly by exploring the perspective of the environment (e.g., Time and Location) and the characteristics of a bicycle (e.g., Price and Type).

When is the “dangerous time zone”?

Dividing the 24-hour day into four time slots, we found that most bicycle thefts occurred between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. and between 5 p.m. and 10 p.m. (i.e., 11 a.m. - 10 p.m.), which is when the most traffic occurs. As can be seen from the graph, the morning hours tend to be less vulnerable to theft. Combining the days of the week, we find that weekdays and weekends have the same characteristics, respectively. On weekdays, cases are more concentrated between 5 p.m. and 10 p.m., while on weekends, cases are more concentrated between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. There are two possible reasons for the concentration of cases during these two periods: First, there is a visible increase in the number of bicycles parked in public areas due to the high number of trips during this time. Second, it is easier to commit theft at this time due to the high volume of traffic and the noisy environment.

In practice, however, the time reporters notice the loss is often different from the actual time the theft occurred. For example, many commuters park their bicycles in the morning and do not notice the theft until the end of the working day. This may be the reason why weekday thefts are concentrated between 5 p.m. and 10 p.m. Another case is that thefts are hardly observed on weekday nights. This may be because commuters usually have little activity late at night and often do not notice the theft until the next morning. On the contrary, on the weekends, due to the relatively free schedule, reporters can notice thefts at any time.

Be careful when you park your bicycle beyond your sight.

In the past 17,000+ cases, the premise types in descending order corresponding to the number of cases are “outside > apartment > other > house > commercial”. This could be linked to the ability to supervise. ‘Outside’ is known as an unsupervised open area and is widely distributed. Therefore, theft is more likely to occur. In addition, bike thefts are more likely to occur surrounding apartments and houses than around some commercial places such as shopping malls. This is probably due to the fact that the parking lots provided by ‘commercial’ tend to have a certain level of security supervision, which makes thefts more difficult to occur.

Outside accounted for around 35% of the overall cases, so we delved into the breakdown of the outside categories. About 60% of the cases in the four categories occurred in streets, roads, and highways (referred to as streets). Parking lots come next, followed by open areas (e.g., Parks). In context, there are numerous bicycle racks along those busy streets, which are usually unsupervised, resulting in high bike theft rates. The open area here is defined as lakes, parks, and rivers, often with only a small number of bicycle spaces and possibly with a certain level of supervision. It hence results in a small number of bicycle thefts. It is worth mentioning that the portion of the TTC bus stop, shelter, and loop is barely seen in the figure. This is perhaps not because of the high level of security in such locations but because so few bicycles parking here, and it is easily confused with the road by its definition. In practice, parking lots and streets, which are everywhere in the city and have plenty of space, have become the mainstream choice for parking. The theft rate of parking lots is nearly 60% lower than that of streets, so it may be a better choice to choose parking lots when parking.

Are the more expensive bicycles more likely to be stolen?

A total of more than 17,000 bicycles were stolen in Toronto between 2014 and 2019, with an approximate average price of $955. Among all cases, merely less than 200 bicycles were recovered, which greatly indicates the difficulty of recovery.

The above figures examine the relationship between the status of stolen bicycles and their prices. We define bicycles with above-average prices ( > $955) as ‘Expensive’, and the status is divided into lost and recovered. According to the stolen cases, the total number of ‘Not Expensive’ bicycles is twice as many as that of the ‘Expensive’ ones. As such, in past cases, the price of lost bicycles was generally low. We can hardly see whether there is a relationship between price and being stolen or not, so it cannot reveal that a more expensive bicycle is more likely to be stolen.

By studying the recovered cases, we found that again, the number of ‘Not Expensive’ bicycles recovered more than the ‘Expensive’ ones. However, the difference between the two is much smaller than the stolen cases. From the stats, the overall recovery rate is about 0.8%. In separate, the recovery rate for expensive bicycles is about 1.1%, while the recovery rate for not expensive bicycles is about 0.6%. This may be due to many reasons. It could be that the police place greater attention on high-value items, or it could be that expensive bicycles are equipped with more advanced features to help people locate them. But in general, no matter whether it is expensive or not expensive, the recovery rate (approx. 0.8%) is extremely low. Once stolen, it hardly recovered.

TRUE or FALSE: “If your bicycle looks very unique, you might want to be careful.”

The graph indicates that regular (RG) and mountain (MT) bikes contribute to the theft cases the most, which might be because of the market share. Moreover, that is potential because regular bicycles and mountain bikes are widely used as transportation in a city, and they can be easily resold and transferred into cash flow after being stolen. However, more interestingly, note that in recent years, electric bicycles (EL), scooters (ST), and racer bicycles (RC) have been emerging. Although the number of thefts is low (probably due to low market share), the probability of recovery is much higher than that of regular and mountain bikes. That outcome coincides with our previous discussion of recovery rate and price, as they all belong to the ‘Expensive’ category. Similarly, the advancement in technology may lead to its high recovery rate. For instance, those electric bikes might contain a GPS that can track their trajectory.

Besides, the depiction shows some types of bikes, such as recumbent (RE), tandem (TA), tricycle (TR), and unicycle UN, are rarely stolen; and that is because they are not in common compared to the types such as regular bikes and mountains ones.

If you intend to ride a bicycle in Toronto frequently. . .

We suggest you learn more security in advance, such as thinking about where you can park your bike for your usual trips. If you can’t avoid going into densely populated urban areas, you should avoid parking your bicycle in unsupervised open areas (e.g., streets) and choose commercial parking lots instead, ideally. Registering your newly purchased bicycle with the Toronto Public Service is also a good idea to improve the probability of recovery in case of loss.

By looking at the data, we noticed overlaps in the location types under premise types, which leads to the fact that cases can be recorded in different categories. For example, Parking lots may be classified into apartments, commercial, or outside. Relevant authorities could introduce a more precise category without overlap. This will help to study better the characteristics of the theft locations in the future. In addition, the relevant authorities may consider installing more surveillance cameras, particularly on the streets due to the high rates of bicycle thefts there, and advocate for the public to register their bicycles on Toronto Public Service.

Sure to purchase a bicycle in Toronto? The answer depends.

Overall, bike thefts are still a serious issue in Toronto, especially in the downtown area. Surprisingly, bike thefts rarely happen at midnight compared to the other time slots in the daytime; instead, it happens mostly during peak commuting and off-duty rush time. There is no doubt that parking your bicycle along streets would carry a greater risk of being stolen; hence, it had better configure a lock with high-performance security for your bicycle.

Besides, the outcomes took us by surprise again while taking messages from a bicycle itself: Common bikes are more likely to be stolen though they are not worth much. Hence, those types of bikes become a target to a great extent.

Are you sure you want to purchase a bicycle in Toronto? The answer depends. Because a bicycle, as usual transport, is indispensable in our life. However, you may also want to take account of the risk of thefts with the potential loss.

Ultimately, with the strength in awareness of safety and the development of security technologies for bicycles, we still expect bike thefts to decline, and people can significantly take advantage of riding bicycles in the future.

The fact could be worse than we observed.

Some limitations have led to uncertainty.

The occurrence time recorded might not be the actual time the bike theft occurred, which might lead to some biases in our analysis related to ‘Time’ as we discussed previously. Moreover, some data values might not be reported to the police system, which results in abundant missing values in our dataset, and we lack analysis on those missing observations.

The overlap among premise types confuses when recording the case into the police system, and thus results in an uncertainty of analysis on ‘location types’ (i.e., parking lots can be recorded under the apartment, commercial, or outside).

It is difficult to distinguish some observations with similar values. For instance, when visualizing the characteristics of recovery rate and bicycle type, it is not sufficiently clear to present the differences in stolen cases between regular bikes and mountain bikes since their values are similar. Simultaneously, the gradient showing the percentage of recovered bikes is not also performed the best since their values are all relatively small and similar. To perform them better, we annotate a few labels that effectively present the differences between observations.

Bibliography

[1]“Bicycle Thefts.” Public Safety Data Portal, https://data.torontopolice.on.ca/datasets/TorontoPS::bicyclethefts/explore?location=43.700328%2C-79.429535%2C10.94.

[2]O’Shea, Sean. “Nearly 4,000 Bikes Reported Stolen in Toronto throughout 2020 - Toronto.” Global News, Global News, 5 Apr. 2021, https://globalnews.ca/news/7739568/bike-thefts-toronto-police/.