There's a few
new bike registries popping up on the radar:
I recently wrapped up a WordPress plugin for
BikePortland.org that lets people in Portland, Oregon register and list their stolen bikes in a small,
bikeportland.org-local registry. Their bikes are then cross-listed in the SBR for better searching and recovery power!
I'm still beating the stupid out of the plugin (and if you've never tried WordPress plugin programming before, I suggest you start drinking
before you do just to help ease the transition) but it has a
lot of promise. Big ups to
BikePortland for hooking the thing up and adding all kinds of Wordpress kung-fu, like
Twitter integration. That's right - there's now a
damn twitter page for stolen bikes in Portland, over at
stolenbikespdx!
It also looks like the city of Austin, Texas will be hand-rolling their own local registry. There's a post up about this oncoming initiative over at the always-awesome
ATXBS.com:
The City of Austin, Austin Police Department and the Public Works Department are in the process of implementing an educational campaign to foster camaraderie between the cycling communities and to assist in the safety awareness to cyclists, citizens and motorists. City departments have begun to examine ways to implement a voluntary web-based program that would be accessible to all users containing information on reporting bicycle thefts, registration, and safety procedures.
I spoke with a policy aide from Austin a while back about this and I'm way happy to see them moving forward with the idea. Individual cities and towns are
much better equipped to handle things like 'pre-registration', i.e. registrations for bikes that haven't been stolen yet. And they're more prone to getting their own cops and other local law-enforcement types involved in the process, which is a huge help at the local level. And, hey, the more registries == more recovered bikes.
The one thing I've always asked people to do if they're going to go build a registry is to
bake some interoperability into their system, so everybody's registries can 'talk' to one another. That way, if someone runs a serial number in the SBR, my website can 'ask' the city of Austin website if it has any bikes on file with the same serial.
This is actually a pretty easy thing to do (XML! API's! INTERNETS!!oneone!!111) and it prevents the 'balkanization' of whatever registries come online -
and more importantly, it greatly increases the chance of getting your bikes back.
