How to Avoid Being Bike-Jacked

Introduction

About a month ago, an email went around my cycling team about a bike-jacking on Wildcat Canyon Road up in the Berkeley hills: two men ran a guy off the road with their car, then stole his bike at knifepoint. (The Nextdoor report is here.) A week later, another report came in, this one from Strava and also reported in Berkeleyside, about two more cyclists being robbed of their bike, this time at gunpoint. Also mentioned were two other tales of cyclists escaping apparent robbery attempts. And just last week I came across yet another report of a cyclist being robbed at gunpoint, this time of his mountain bike.

I have continued to ride throughout this crime spree, and now, as a service to my fellow Bay Area cyclists and anyone anywhere who faces this threat, I offer my strategies for protecting yourself and—more importantly—your bike.

A few details 

I’ve pored over the articles for as much information as possible, but there are a lot of gaps. The first guy, we’re told, “had been run off the road about halfway between El Toyonol [sic] and Inspiration Point, by two men in a grey VW or Toyota sedan – ‘looked like primer’. He surrendered his bike when threatened with a knife. One of the men left with the car and the second rode the bike, both toward Berkeley. He was not clear on the description of the two men saying he was mostly focused on the knife.” Other than his bike being a “Trek Madrone” [sic] there’s not much more info.

Right off the bat, I’m pretty frustrated. I mean, “VW or Toyota”—what the hell is that? Any normal male above the age of ten should be able to tell the make, model, and year (give or take) of just about any car. But this guy? Let’s face it, VWs and Toyotas don’t look very much alike, whereas Toyotas and Hondas are practically identical. Consider the following exhibits:

Obviously, the car could have just as easily been a Honda, and by extension a Lexus or Acura. So all we really know about the vehicle is that it’s not a Prius and not an SUV. Gee, thanks. (Actually, a Prius would be the perfect getaway vehicle around here because it would be so inconspicuous. But an eco-friendly villain? I can’t see it happening.)

Perhaps more annoying than the victim’s poor observational skills is the typical prevalence of stupid comments below the news story. Lots of politically charged stuff in there about “PC politics,” “defunding the police,” etc. One guy wrote, “Race of criminals; suppressed. Type of bikes; secret.” What does he mean “suppressed”? By whom? There’s a difference between neglecting (or failing to notice) this or that detail vs. it being kept from us as though by conspiracy. And really, the type of bike is irrelevant. Am I safer because I ride a Giant, when the criminals are apparently targeting Treks? Uh huh.

I would argue that the thieves’ race (though it was brought up by four commenters in the first Berkeleyside article) is also irrelevant. We cyclists want info that will help us keep an eye out for the perps during our rides. This is why knowing it was, say, a mid-‘80s VW Jetta would be really useful. But suppose, for the sake of argument, the perps were white guys. Does this mean I need to peer into every car I see and try to make sure the driver isn’t white? Pffff.

There’s also the probability that multiple, independent criminals are involved. Copycat thieves, if you will. Which brings me to my perp-agnostic strategies.

Strategy 1 - Choose different routes

The hardest thing to figure out with these reports is whether the victim was riding uphill or down. This makes a big difference. Consider the guy run off the road on Wildcat Canyon. If he was climbing, he’d have been a sitting duck for the thieves; that climb (from San Pablo Dam Road to Inspiration Point) takes me like 13 minutes (and chances are I go faster than a bike-jacking victim plucked at random). But the descent is under six minutes, so a thief would have to be pretty lucky to happen upon me (unless he’s sitting in wait—but his VW or Toyota or whatever the hell it is better be pretty fast to catch up from a dead stop on that twisty road). So I’ve stopped climbing Wildcat (but I’ll still descend it). Instead, I can go up El Toyonal and Lomas Cantadas and then down South Park Drive . (Lomas is closed to through traffic except bikes; South Park is closed to cars during the pandemic.)

Other thefts and attempts were on Grizzly Peak Blvd, most of which isn’t that great a road anyway. The residential section is dangerous because the locals tend to drive poorly; e.g., pulling out of their driveways without looking , or worse. (Click here for a particularly egregious example.) This stupid street is easily avoided if you go up South Park, and if you don’t want that steep a climb but want to reach destinations south, you could ride through Berkeley and go up Tunnel Road to Skyline. So far those roads haven’t been a target.

Bear in mind, I don’t always feel like climbing Lomas, in which case I stay on El Toyonal. The section east of Lomas, which connects to Wildcat Canyon Road, is closed to cars. I do have to then ride up the top half of Wildcat, but I can do that in under six minutes—a risk I’m generally willing to take. More on this later.

(Am I doing a disservice to my fellow cyclists by giving away these secret routes to prospective thieves? No. First of all, there’s nothing they can do about these roads being closed. Second, thieves don’t read this blog. If they did, they wouldn’t be thieves … they’d be procrastinating grad students, retirees, and/or my mom.)

Strategy 2 - Evasive action

If you’re descending and somebody tries to pull alongside to run you off the road, you could try to outmaneuver them. For example, you could take the left lane. The evil driver would have to have balls like King Kong to follow you over there. After all, if you encountered an oncoming car, you could ditch off the left side and probably not crash—but the would-be thief would be out of luck. Of course this technique has the moral flaw of putting an innocent motorist or cyclist (i.e., the one possibly coming the other way) in danger. So I don’t really recommend it.

Now, if you’re climbing, and really paying attention, you could probably stop quickly enough to avoid being run off the road. Then you could pop your feet out of the pedals and roll backward, paddling with your feet, long enough turn your bike around, clip back in, and flee downhill.

When I climb Wildcat from El Toyonal to the summit, I figure that if I do encounter a thief, and can manage to turn around, I could be back at El Toyonal and the safety of its gate in under three minutes, worst case. That’s not so long to hold off a deranged motorist. And the gate really would save me … it’s not like one of those matchstick ones the bad guys plow through on TV.

Strategy 3 - the “human shield”

I’ve only used this technique by accident. I was descending Wildcat and caught up to another cyclist. I didn’t want to pass (because it’s hard to give the guy the requisite six feet of COVID clearance, so passing would be rude). I hung back 100 feet or so, and in the process realized that if a would-be thief were lying in wait ahead, he’d get the guy ahead of me, and I could turn around and flee. (Er, turn around and get help—that’s what I meant.) And if a motorist started trying to catch me from behind, I could just sprint a bit, pass the other cyclist, and let him be the victim. (While I went for help, of course.) Employing this strategy while riding up a hill would require more patience, but could be done. A downside to this scheme is that you’d have to wait at the top or bottom of the climb for a suitable human shield to show up.

A variation on this would be “humans shield” whereby you ride in a large group. (History has shown that two riders isn’t enough.) Of course, everyone in your group would have to be vaccinated first … but we’re getting there.

Strategy 4 - the “I’m-with-Grandma”

This is a variation on the human shield, with the human being in a car. I discovered this by accident too, when I got stuck behind an elderly, slow driver on the way down Wildcat. Again, a thief sitting in wait ahead would rule me out because there wouldn’t be enough space between me and Grandma’s car to move in. And if a thief came from behind, I could sprint around Grandma … the thief probably wouldn’t dare follow.

Strategy 5 - Capitulate

Of course you could just willingly comply and cooperate with the thief. After all, it’s just a bike, right? And isn’t every cyclist always looking for an excuse to buy a new ride? Consider the following exhibit, a chat I had with a friend recently over the absurd price of new chainrings and even replacing a simple bolt:

(Harrison, in this context, is my late father.)

The are problems with this strategy, though. As far as I can tell, homeowners’ and auto insurance don’t cover this kind of theft—and proper racing bikes are expensive. On top of that, I don’t trust criminals to be reasonable just because I’m cooperating. They’re loose cannons, right? Finally, I don’t trust myself to follow through and be docile. When I think of how angry I got when some shitbird stole the handlebars off my commuter bike, I sense I’d be ready for hand-to-hand combat if someone went for my entire bike. As a kid I used to get in a fair number of fistfights, and a weird, crude part of me misses them. Which brings me to the next strategy.

Strategy 6 - the Walt Longmire

I was unarmed—who brings a Colt M1911 on a bike ride?—so I decided to hand over my bike, even though the guy only had a knife. But knowing he’d try to escape on my bike, I opened the rear quick release as I rolled it to him. I’d taken off my helmet to try to draw his eyes away from my tampering, but he didn’t fall for it. “What did you do?” he asked, looking down. I saw my opportunity and swung my helmet as hard as I could up into his face. As he recoiled, I threw my entire bulk at him, pinning him to the ground under the bike. I wrested the knife from his hand and was about to pummel his face when his accomplice yelled, “Think again, asshole!”

I looked over to see the endless, stainless barrel of a Colt .357 pointed at my face… All I could think was that this was the last thing I would see. Time froze then, and it was as if the air had died…” Suddenly a giant cyclist came barreling down toward us doing at least thirty, stuck out a knee and an elbow, and nailed the gunman, sending him sprawling across the asphalt. I jumped to my feet, seized the dropped sidearm even before it stopped skittering across the road, and had the perp covered within seconds. Henry Standing Bear downshifted, turned around, and rode back up in time to yank the other thief from the ground and put him in a hammerlock before he could do anything.

The big Indian said calmly, “The thieves clearly did not realize you were riding with a friend. It is a good thing you dropped me before beginning your descent of Wildcat.”

(Note: the italicized text above is taken verbatim from Death Without Company by Craig Johnson, Penguin Books, 2006, page 245. Used without permission.)

Strategy 7 - Ride in the morning

There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you: I don’t rely on clever routes alone to avoid bike-jackers. I also ride bloody early in the morning—as in, before dawn. Why am I confident in this strategy? Well, so far the documented thefts have occurred between 11:00 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. And think about it: thieves are never morning persons. If they were morning persons, they’d have fricking jobs and wouldn’t have to rob people!

So you may be wondering how this is working out for me. So far, it’s great! For one thing, it’s a lot quieter and more peaceful … just me and the turkeys and an occasional jogger. That photo at the top of this post is the view of Mount Diablo from Wildcat Canyon Road, snapped during one of these morning rides.

On a recent outing, I didn’t encounter my first car until almost half an hour in, when a douchebag in a big Benz blew by me, coming way closer to me than necessary—practically grazing me—and going waaaaay over the speed limit. He wasn’t trying to rob me, though—he turned in to the parking lot at Inspiration Point. Why the rush? I’m guessing he wanted to get to his favorite meadow in time to do his sun salutation just as the sun came up over the horizon. What a git.

(Ironically enough, his unsafe pass occurred within twenty feet of this sign:

So you see, he was a scofflaw; just not a bike thief.)

Minutes later, I encountered another vehicle, suspiciously parked at the side of Wildcat Canyon Road, on the stretch where the first cyclist was robbed. But the vehicle was a Honda Element: way too conspicuous, not to mention nerdy, for thieves … it is beneath their criminal dignity. Meanwhile, the aroma of burning ganja emanating from the vehicle was strong enough to put me at ease. Even if the driver tried to rob me, I’d just have to stall him for a bit and he’d forget what he was doing and wander off.

After that, there were a few cars on San Pablo Dam Road but that’s a major commuter thoroughfare (with the traffic in the opposite direction, happily enough). Next up was El Toyonal, which is a beast of a climb but zero mugging risk … even the most boneheaded thief knows almost nobody rides here. You could wait half a day for a victim to happen along.

Not feeling like tackling Lomas Cantadas, I took the El Toyonal cut-through to Wildcat. It’s as peaceful a road as you could want:

Probably the riskiest part of my ride was heading up the top half of Wildcat towards Inspiration Point. That vulnerable bit of the route is why I ride so early. As it turned out, the only other car that passed me was a Tesla. I wasn’t bothered in the slightest, because Tesla owners are more the type to commit white collar crime.

Note that if you adopt the early morning strategy, it’ll get easier as summer approaches and the days got longer. Here’s a handy chart showing civil twilight times for this area:

This morning, civil twilight started at 5:56 a.m. I was on the road at 6:04, plenty early enough to get 20 miles in and still show up to work (at home, of course) by 8:00.

But what if you want to do a much longer ride, like the 70-mile round trip to the Mount Diablo summit? That brings me to my last anti-mugging strategy.

Strategy 8 - Slip between the horns

The other weekend, I wanted to ride Mount Diablo, but wouldn’t make it back to the Berkeley hills until early afternoon. The obvious solution to this problem would be to ride home over El Toyonal and Lomas Cantadas. But I don’t have nearly the fitness to do that … I missed a lot of riding last year due to injury, and I knew I’d be pretty well shattered by the Diablo summit, over thirty miles from home. The alternative would be crawling home over Wildcat in the afternoon, clearly a risky behavior. As I silently pondered the matter, my wife said, “Hey, how about I go shopping in Walnut Creek and meet you for lunch? You could throw a change of clothes in the car and drive home with me.”

Genius! She had seemingly recognized my false dichotomy (the fallacy that Lomas and Wildcat were my only options) and deftly slipped between the horns of the dilemma. Actually, her plan had nothing to do with the local crime spree, which (thankfully) I don’t reckon she thinks much about. It was just a novel idea of how to spend the afternoon.

It worked out perfectly: I destroyed myself on the mountain, coasted down the other side, found the car, changed, and twenty minutes later I was inhaling yucca fries, a Cuban sandwich, and a pint of IPA, with my bike safely locked up in the back of the car. This became the first point-to-point training ride of the year, with a sprinkling of net elevation gain to boot ... and exactly zero bike thieves. NOOICE!

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From the Archives - Freak Bicycle Accident

Introduction

I consider bicycling to be a reasonably safe activity. Obviously it has its risks, and I’ve been injured a few times. Even so, by my rough calculation, I’ve cycled close to 200,000 miles, so I’m fine with my track record so far. There are those who think urban cycling in particular is unconscionably dangerous, but you know what else is dangerous? Urban walking. I don’t recall anybody trying to make the case that pedestrians should just give it up (unless you count Irvine, California where walking is so unheard of, it’s practically against the law.)

A recent article in “Berkeleyside” provides maps of where in Berkeley the reported pedestrian and cyclist accidents occurred last year. According to the Berkeley police, 230 people were injured across 220 accidents, and three killed. Of these, 98 involved bicycles, with 99 injured and one dead. Here is the map of bicycle accidents:

A yellow marker indicates that the driver was at fault; blue means it was the cyclist’s fault. So how does this break down? Police ruled that “fault was evenly split, with drivers and cyclists each responsible 47% of the time.”

What about the other 6% of the time (indicated with a green icon)? In those cases, police didn’t assign blame to either party. And yet, in three of these four accidents, the cause was “unsafe door opening.” So … would it be that hard to ascribe blame? Let me give you cops a hint: do bicycles have doors?

In my experience, and that of most of my cycling pals, police are quick to assign blame to cyclists in the absence of overwhelming evidence that the motorist was at fault. Consider my worst bike accident ever: the driver ahead of me inexplicably swung to the right, and then cut a hard hairpin left turn in front of me to head into her driveway. Needless to say she didn’t look behind her, nor signal her turn. I laid down the bike trying not to T-bone her car. Later, after the ambulance hauled me away, the cop rang her doorbell to get her story. (She’d been hiding in her house throughout the ordeal, ignoring my screams, which her neighbors heard a block away.) She claimed to have used her turn signal and that she had behaved very predictably and safely. The police officer took her word for it, even though (as detailed here) her testimony cannot have made any sense. The fact that my bicycle didn’t actually collide with her car further exonerated her. The cop chalked it up as my fault because I was “going too fast” (even though I was below the speed limit). I guess he had a point: if I’d been going walking speed, I might have been able to stop in time. So I’ll make a deal: I’ll go at walking speed from now on, so long as motorists agree to do the same.

Bicycling (like driving) will always involve some risk, no matter how careful we are. Just today, a friend of mine was hit by a car while bicycling. The driver was texting. While driving. While driving, in fact, through a roundabout. Who does that?

But yeah, I’ll confess that cycling has its dangers even when drivers aren’t directly involved. I recently stumbled across an email to a few friends from about six years ago, recounting my most bizarre bicycle accident ever. What follows is about 80% gripping yarn, 20% cautionary tale.

Freak bike accident – November 2013

Let me tell you about my crazy bike accident. Yesterday evening I was riding home from Bart [the train station, less than a mile from home] in the dark, around 6 p.m. I had basic lights front and rear. I was trying to turn left on Gilman Street and thought a particular driver was going to let me in, so I was out in the road. It’s a never-ending stream of cars at that hour, heading towards I-80, and they’re all fricking zombies, stricken by tunnel vision as they slog through their commute. Alas, it soon became apparent that, eye contact notwithstanding, the driver wasn’t going to let me go ahead of him after all. The gap he’d allowed to open ahead of his car was apparently unintentional, for now he closed it right up, shaving precious fractions of a second off his commute time. I guess the look he gave me was meant to convey, “I see you there, and I don’t care.”

[Coincidentally enough, this act of non-courtesy occurred almost exactly at the site on the map below, where—about four months ago—a driver failed to yield while turning left, struck and injured a cyclist, and didn’t stop.]

This guy’s attitude was shared by the whole line of drivers, whose safety seemed assured at this speed even though unbeknownst to most of them they were slowly dying, a withering wasting car commuter’s death, the death of actual living that doesn’t become apparent until it’s too late. I rode back across the (empty) left lane and hopped the curb up onto the sidewalk. My plan was to head a short distance down to a crosswalk where I could walk my bike across Gilman, as that’s the only way to get these rush hour motorists to let you through.

So there I was, riding along on the sidewalk, and then suddenly I was down. I mean, it was the weirdest thing, because normally you see a crash coming, and in fact time seems to slow down. (This is because, as detailed here, “your amygdala [acts] as an emergency control center that gets all the other parts of the brain to quit mucking around with their daily tasks and concentrate all the resources on the one, main thing that is happening.”) Normally, there’s an opportunity for evasive action or at least to think, “Oh, shit!” But not this time. I just suddenly realized I was no longer in control, was no longer moving, and was somehow in great pain. Given the suddenness of this situation, and the astonishing force of it—suddenly, everything hurt—I automatically assumed a car must have been involved.

And yet, the weirdest thing was, I wasn’t actually on the ground. The bike was down and I was tangled up with it, but I’d landed on my feet. “Landed?” you may well ask. “What do you mean landed? Like, from where?” I know, it makes no sense. Somehow I went from biking to landing with seemingly nothing in between. I immediately dreaded having to tell my wife about the crash, and the whole situation was so horrifying I found myself yelling, “NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!”

And then I thought, wait, if I’m not actually down on the ground, then I haven’t really crashed. This was a bit of a relief because I was wearing a nice suit and it’d have been ruined. But it wasn’t much of a relief because I was in so dang much pain. My back hurt, my neck, my groin, but especially my head. My head? WTF!? Why would my head hurt when it was nowhere near the ground?

My mind raced, trying to make sense of the situation. With no car involved, and my head far from the ground, I figured somebody must have bashed me with a baseball bat or something. Or maybe I’d been shot? I staggered around, taking in the scene. And then I finally put it together: there’s a tree planted in the median with a big stout bare branch, with very dark bark, sticking out over the sidewalk. I never saw it and I’d simply run headfirst into that bad boy—it was a bit like being clotheslined. I wasn’t going all that fast, but this was nevertheless a terrible way to be (mostly) separated from my bike.

Man, it was horrible. I righted the bike, was amazed to see the chain hadn’t even fallen off, and remounted, but I was in so, so much pain. My head, man, it was just killing me. And my groin, it felt like somebody very strong had tried really hard to rip my leg off. My shoulder hurt , my neck hurt, my back, my legs ... I just moaned and groaned the rest of the way home (only a couple blocks). I got into the garage, flipped on the light, and inspected my helmet. I’m so, so glad I was wearing it. Sure enough, the foam was compressed and cracked ... totally unsurprising given that my head felt like it had taken a hit from a bolt gun. This was a big burly Bell helmet, my commuting helmet, and I though I’m sad to see it go, it obviously served me well.

I hobbled into the house, and my 12-year-old daughter saw me and gasped: “Oh my gosh, Dad!”

I thought, oh no, I must be missing some memory of this thing—maybe I did hit the ground, maybe I’m all bloody or ripped up or something! But I tried to play it cool. “What?” I asked faux-innocently. Alexa said, “Well, it’s just ... I’ve never seen you in a suit before!” Man, what a relief. She didn’t suspect a thing.

I went upstairs and it hurt just taking my suit off. I crawled into bed to rest a bit. It hurt to move so I just lay there on my back. I just wanted to lie there the whole night, but of course there was dinner to prepare and kids to deal with, and actually I knew in the back of my mind that it would probably be a good idea to stay awake for a few more hours and make sure I didn’t get dizzy, or hurl, or look in the mirror and see my eyes dilated or spinning like pinwheels or whatever happens when you have a concussion. [If, back then, I’d had the concussion protocol training I’ve since received as a high school mountain bike coach, I’d have had myself checked out far more thoroughly, believe me.]

So I stuck it out, finished out the evening, cleaned the kitchen, read to my younger daughter, stayed up until 10 or 10:30, took like four Advil and some beer, and got to bed. I woke up this morning feeling really sore and stiff, and I can barely walk. My head hurt most of the day but it’s better now. (I took a two-hour online training on RFID technology and passed the test, so my brain does still seem to work.) Mainly my groin hurts,  but also my neck, like I can barely turn my head. Riding is pretty much out of the question. It’s horrible.

Anyway, the funny thing is, when I was heading out yesterday morning, I actually thought about not wearing my helmet. I had fresh gel in my hair, for one thing; plus, a guy in a suit wearing a helmet on his commuter bike is just so nerdy. But I only paused for a second before doing the right thing and putting on the ol’ brain bucket. So what if I have reactivated hair gel and helmet-head for my big meeting ... vanity is for weenies, right? Right. Man, oh man, I’m so glad I was wearing that thing. If I hadn’t, I might be a corpse now, or an extremist political pundit with his own radio show.

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