Of Bikes, Pipes and the Gurgling Goodness
Jun. 16th, 2008 12:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutThere've been some articles (hey, if an NYT guy can assert there _haven't_ been articles, I can assert I've seen articles without links) lately about how motorcycle events/sales/what have you are hurting, which is a little weird, of course, because scooters have taken off like a rocket, and some motorcycles get great gas mileage. Of course, the kind of motorcycles that have events built around them _don't_, which is really where we are at right now.
In the course of digging on this gas theft question, I ran across indications that people were so interested in motorcycles that people have been stealing them.
http://www.voiceofsandiego.org/articles/2008/06/13/government/523theft061308.txt
Of course, that's in a city where it's viable to ride motorcycles for commuting year round.
Once upon a time, one might lock one's bike (not motorcycle; bicycle) to a pipe to prevent it being stolen. These days, of course, there's a risk the pipe will be stolen. Well, probably not the ones you'd lock a bike to, but definitely the copper in a house -- or that operates the gate for the level crossing for the high speed commuter train. Gives me the willies sometimes.
It's all well and good to take advantage of this kind of trend to sell locking gas caps, but the cold hard truth is that is not going to be adequate in a world in which people are drilling tanks and cutting fuel lines and shoving a bucket underneath to capture the gurgling goodness for whatever purposes they might intend for it (resale? barter for a fix? to fuel their own vehicle to get to the next theft?).
You could _imagine_ a world in which the gas tank and lines were protected from this kind of thing, and I wouldn't be too surprised to see this as a feature in the future. But that certainly doesn't help us with our current cars. Anyone who can lock up their vehicle wherever they park it (garage, etc.) has an edge; I could sort of see that encouraging the split between drive vs. public transport/vanpool/carpool -- make someone _else_ take the gas theft risk associated with control of the vehicle. (Are park 'n' ride lots particularly subject to gas siphoning?)
As the world gets more fully connected, I could also imagine using cameras to protect lots/cars -- or even some kind of surveillance system retrofittable on an individual car/parking space. R. jokes that there are probably cars out on the road now where if they have a full tank of gas, the scrap value of the car + the gas in the tank is worth more than the book value of the car on Empty.
In the course of digging on this gas theft question, I ran across indications that people were so interested in motorcycles that people have been stealing them.
http://www.voiceofsandiego.org/articles/2008/06/13/government/523theft061308.txt
Of course, that's in a city where it's viable to ride motorcycles for commuting year round.
Once upon a time, one might lock one's bike (not motorcycle; bicycle) to a pipe to prevent it being stolen. These days, of course, there's a risk the pipe will be stolen. Well, probably not the ones you'd lock a bike to, but definitely the copper in a house -- or that operates the gate for the level crossing for the high speed commuter train. Gives me the willies sometimes.
It's all well and good to take advantage of this kind of trend to sell locking gas caps, but the cold hard truth is that is not going to be adequate in a world in which people are drilling tanks and cutting fuel lines and shoving a bucket underneath to capture the gurgling goodness for whatever purposes they might intend for it (resale? barter for a fix? to fuel their own vehicle to get to the next theft?).
You could _imagine_ a world in which the gas tank and lines were protected from this kind of thing, and I wouldn't be too surprised to see this as a feature in the future. But that certainly doesn't help us with our current cars. Anyone who can lock up their vehicle wherever they park it (garage, etc.) has an edge; I could sort of see that encouraging the split between drive vs. public transport/vanpool/carpool -- make someone _else_ take the gas theft risk associated with control of the vehicle. (Are park 'n' ride lots particularly subject to gas siphoning?)
As the world gets more fully connected, I could also imagine using cameras to protect lots/cars -- or even some kind of surveillance system retrofittable on an individual car/parking space. R. jokes that there are probably cars out on the road now where if they have a full tank of gas, the scrap value of the car + the gas in the tank is worth more than the book value of the car on Empty.