STOLEN BIKES

Unfortunately, despite being a bike-friendly community, bike theft still happens on this campus, but only if you do not properly lock your bike (no one will be cutting your lock, except us if you abandon your bike).

Students will frequently "borrow" unlocked bikes for a quick ride to class or to their dorm but will never return the bike to its original location afterwards. Bikes are also more likely to be stolen if they have been sitting in the same place for an extended period of time. If you are not going to be riding your bike for a long period, store it indoors.

What this luckily means for you, the unfortunate soul who now has to find their bike, is that bikes stolen from campus racks are likely still on campus.

To prevent this from happening, follow the steps below:

Register your bike with Safety and Security. This makes proof of ownership incredibly easy in cases where we can recover your stolen bike. Make sure to email them a photo of your bike in good lighting after registering.
Always lock your bike! Yes, even if you're running into Collis for 5 minutes to grab something. A lock is no good if it's not being used.
Make sure to turn more than one dial if you have a combination lock, as even if a bike is locked, some more crafty thieves know that lazy students will only turn one dial of their lock and can open the lock if you do not securely use it.

If, for some reason, after following all the above steps (or possibly missing some...), your bike still got stolen or lost,

Help, my bike was stolen!

We can still help!

Follow the steps below if your bike was stolen:

Report the theft to Safety and Security, even if it wasn't registered. During the report, ask them to look up and write down the following information: your bike's registration number (if you forgot it), make, model, colors, speeds, serial number, and a photo of your bike. They'll ask you for more details like when/where the bike was stolen.
Report the theft to Hanover Police, reporting the same information as above, and include the registration information that you recorded from SNS.
Make an entry in our Dartmouth Bikes Bounty Board. This is a community document useful for crowd-sourcing stolen bike recovery, and it assists us (the Dartmouth Bikes Team) in looking for your bike! Out of lack of foresight, we and Safety and Security don't share the bikes database, meaning we don't have access to which bikes are even stolen on campus. It is only after we have taken in an abandoned bike that we can look up the registration number, and by then, the owner may have even left campus or forgotten about their stolen bike. Instead of emailing us about your stolen bike, please post a picture and fill out an entry in the document, and we will automatically be on the lookout for it!