Culture
Everyone's Pretty Jealous of Seattle's 'Bike Batman'
With bike thefts rampant and often unreported, a lone vigilante might be the savior robbed cyclists need.
In Seattle, a thirty-something engineer has taken to riding around the city in search of bicycle thieves. His goal is noble: to reunite bereft cyclists with their stolen wheels.
He calls himself the Bike Batman, but his tactics are less superhero than supersleuth: The Guardian reports that this man (who, for obvious reasons, prefers to remain anonymous) scours Craigslist and sites like OfferUp.com for “suspicious” bike listings—ones in which “the seller appears to know very little about the bike or has a photo in an odd, unidentifiable location.” Those he cross-references against postings on Bike Index, a site where people can register their bikes and report thefts.