No-Steal Bike | God's World News

No-Steal Bike

04/30/2015
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    Cristobal Cabello is one of three Chilean engineers who invented the bike that is also a lock. (AP Photos)
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    A photo displayed on the Yerka site (AP Photos)
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Take that, bike thieves! Some engineering students in Chile have solved an age-old problem. Their self-locking bike invention outsmarted bike-thieves everywhere. When a rider parks the bike, called Yerka, all he or she has to do is pull out the seat, which is attached to a long bar. The rider then attaches the bar to the bike frame, straddling a tree, lamppost, or bike rack. Voila! The bike is locked. This 20-second process keeps bike thieves away for a simple reason: If you break the lock, you break the bike. If you break whatever the bike is attached to, you will end up with a bike twisted into an unusable shape. No bike thief wants that!

The Yerka features anti-theft nuts on its wheels that only the Yerka owner can unlock, protecting even the tires from theft. Using Bluetooth technology, the owner can unlock the Yerka with an app on his or her phone. The bicycles will come in multiple colors and eventually will sell for $399.

Somewhere between 800,000 and two million bicycles are stolen every year. That means millions of people need a solution like the Yerka. Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, has a reputation for being the most bicycle-friendly city in the world. The city has about 250 miles of bike lanes, and people there make 27 percent of their trips on bikes. But the bicycle-friendliness stops there. Every year, thieves nab 20 percent of Amsterdam’s bikes! In Norway, where four percent of trips are taken on bicycles, an experienced bike thief can steal a bike in 10 to 20 seconds—even a locked one. Thieves in Norway export many stolen bikes to Russia and Eastern Europe.

“Necessity is the mother of invention.” People have been repeating that adage since at least the 16th century. In a broken world like ours, we often need inventions to fill needs created by sin. But God gives people the ingenuity to solve all kinds of sin-caused problems—even bicycle theft!