Not even Victoria’s mayor is immune to bike theft.
Lisa Helps left a council meeting about 11 p.m. Thursday, only to find that her “crappy beat-up old mountain bike” had been stripped of its wheels and seat as it sat locked up outside city hall.
“Needless to say I’m feeling a bit sad,” Helps posted on Facebook alongside a photo of the bicycle.
“Upside — walkable city so I can get home easily by foot. But to people who steal bikes or parts thereof — don’t!”
The mayor wasted no time getting back on the road Friday with a borrowed bike while her beloved clunker was outfitted with a new seat and tires.
“I felt fine about five minutes after [posting the photo],” Helps said. “It’s a bit disappointing, but these things happen.”
Online responses to her plight included offers of help, pleas for measures such as more secure bike lock-ups and, as Matthew Christopher Davidson suggested, dedicated bike parkades with surveillance cameras.
“Well, that’s pretty cheeky, right outside city hall!” wrote Anita Fleice.
“This is why we need more cars on the road,” quipped David Aylott.
Added Mary Pynenberg: “There is a special place in hell for people who do this.”
There were also a number of people sharing similar tales of woe.
Staff Sgt. Colin Brown said Victoria police take bike theft “very seriously.”
Officers realize how expensive and important a bicycle can be — especially when, as in the mayor’s case, it is a person’s primary mode of transportation.
“It’s good that she locked up the frame,” Brown said, noting that likely prevented Helps’s entire bike from being stolen. “You want to lock up as much of the bike as you can.”
Thieves often try to sell a stolen bicycle online, or chop it up “and reassemble it to try and throw us off,” he said.
Victoria police’s bike registry, launched in July, allows people to register their contact information and the make and serial number of their bike with police. It aims to reunite stolen bicycles with their rightful owners.
“Before, we could check a bike and it wouldn’t come up as stolen, but now we can run that bike and it’s immediately apparent it was stolen and we can call the registered owner,” Brown said.
About 455 bikes were stolen in the region last year, and approximately 290 were recovered, he said.
So far this year, 484 of 572 bikes stolen have been recovered.
Bike registry forms are available online at vicpd.ca and through the police stations at 850 Caledonia Ave. in Victoria and 500 Park Pl. in Esquimalt.
