Bicycle Locks for Dummies

Stupid job of locking a bicycle to a post

Everyone here at Antisocial Network world HQ rides a bicycle from time to time -- it's pretty much a requirement to work here (and we pay so little most of the staff can't afford a car...). At one time or another, most of us have been the victim of a bicycle thief, which is probably why we were so unimpressed with the sadly lacking advice we found in "The Best Ways to Lock a Bike,"¹ which "communications major," fluent Spanish-speaker and experienced traveler Charlie Rainer Gaston posted on Trails.com. Based on her post, we suspect her last bicycle had a banana seat and pompoms on the handlebars...

We said that because Gaston blew the assignment, big time. All she did was list different varieties of bicycle locks, which is only half the answer. We're were pretty sure she didn't know the other half of the answer when we saw this in her section on "Chain Bike Locks":

"Chain locks can be attached to a front or back wheel and secured to a post when parked."

Attached to a wheel? Is she kidding? We can think of only one way more likely to ensure that you will come back to where your bike was "locked" to find only the one wheel still there, and that's "locking" the bike to a post like someone did in the image above.

No, Charlie, there's more to the best way to lock a bike than just choosing a lock (and FWIW, we've never in all our lives seen a U-lock "with a key hole on the side"). No matter what lock you choose, you need to make certain that at the very least,

• Your bike is locked to something stationary
• A thief can't just lift the bike, lock still attached, off whatever it's "locked" to (see above)
• The lock, at the very least, is wrapped around the bike's frame and not just threaded through a wheel (see right)
• If the bike has quick-release hubs, both wheels are secured by the lock, even if you have to take off the front wheel and move it to the rear

Gaston's ignorance of both bicycles and locks (no matter how extensive her "travel experience") is obvious in her description of U-locks, where she advises readers that

"Standard bicycles generally require a 14mm shackle..."

..."information" Gaston picked up from a motorcycle enthusiast website. Apparently she doesn't even know what a shackle is! We'd think that, at the very least, she could have mentioned the width of the U -- that's probably more important then the diameter of the shackle. But no, Charlie wanted to impress us with her "travel experience" when, in reality, she should have left the question to someone who actually locked bicycles once in a while. She didn't, though, and that's all we needed to make her the Dumbass of the Day again.

¹ This website was sold and the new owners (wisely) deleted user-generated content, but you can read Charlie's post using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   trails.com/list_31938_best-ways-lock-bike.html

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