Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/10/12/london-food-couriers-targeted.html
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This sounds like a job for Hiro Protagonist.
Seriously, though, this is shit.
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Sorry, so people on mopeds are trying to steal food couriers’ bikes/motorbikes so they can use them to commit other crimes?
Such as stealing motorbikes?
It’s monkeys all the way down, I tell you!
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A Bluetooth “key” that has to be in range or the bike kills the ignition. Tuck it away in a safe place. (It could be a phone.) When the thief gets out of range, oops!
Ah, a slight defect: If you chase the thief, the key will be in range again. Details, details…
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This makes it the perfect British solution to the crime: an endless stop-start stop-start chase in the tradition of Benny Hill.
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This is something that Brexit will actually sort out.
There will be no food to deliver.
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I call for a youtube video mashup : a Mad Max pursuit scene with yakety sax !
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“Americans call it a “polite society”
I live in Philadelphia. We never call it that.
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“gasoline is comically expensive”? Nope, it is that it is nowhere near expensive enough in the US. Have you not noticed what is happening to our planet?
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Moped gangs of nadsats on wheels, tolchocking defenseless citizens while hopped up on Moloko Plus. I guess Anthony Burgess was prescient.
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You, ah, didn’t really think this didn’t already exist, did you?
Or a little more metal…
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Taxing consumer use of gasoline won’t make the slightest bit of difference.
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I wonder if tagging the people stealing your bike with dayglo/reflective paint would help. It would make it easier for the police to find the criminals. The driver says “they are more scared of a camera than if I pulled out a weapon”. Of course, the criminals could just beat the crap out of you, but it sounds like they are doing that anyway.
It might lead to a raise in minimum wage though. 
While it’s true that climate change requires a systemic rather than an individualised response, it’s also pretty obvious that there is a connection between underpriced fuel and the USA’s penchant for absurdly oversized and inefficient vehicles. You won’t find a lot of Chevy Suburbans on the road in Europe.
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Slightest bit of difference to what? Making things more expensive generally results in less being consumed, and there is strong evidence that this applies to the burning of gas. Ever noticed the size difference between European and US private vehicles? Remember the “oil shock” when OPEC drove the price up? Is it your view that we’re all fucked anyway so let’s just party?
That the gas tax in the US is a fixed cents-per-gallon that isn’t even indexed is a tremendous failure of public policy that has consequences for us all. The right to “drive everywhere, for absolutely everything” is something that needs to be challenged.
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Short term price spikes don’t make a lot of difference, but longer term changes do. The studies show pretty high variability, but a lot of them seem to cluster somewhere around a .3% drop in Vehicle Miles Traveled per 1% increase in gas costs, with stronger effects when the volatility of the change is low and people think the change will stick. Now that ratio almost certainly doesn’t hold for a 150% price increase, but it gives us an idea. Just increasing the US gas price to UK levels would likely result in substantial declines in VMT, particularly if the tax revenue were reinvested in a good public transit and intercity rail system. Is it anywhere near what we need, nope. But a 1/3 reduction in just light duty vehicles would be roughly equal to the entire residential sector
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Really? I can. This kind of shit happens every day in NYC (and every other American city I’ve lived in).
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We can’t do that, that’s communism! /s
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