Lakewood bike repair station.

A repair station at Lakewood Park. The city has taken steps in recent years to make the West Shore community more bike friendly.

(Patrick Cooley/NEOMG)

LAKEWOOD, Ohio – Lakewood police encourage residents to register their bikes with the city, as they are required to do, saying it makes recovered bikes easier to return to their owners

Few cyclists do so.

As of Aug. 12, only 21 people had registered bikes in 2014. City records show 369 bikes registered in 2013, 353 in 2012 and 364 in 2011. Lakewood has a population of roughly 52,000. It's impossible to tell how many of their owners still live in Lakewood, how many registered bikes have been disposed of or stolen, or if multiple registered bikes have the same owner, said police Capt. Ed Hassing.

Cycling is on the boom in Lakewood, which, along with communities like Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights, invests considerable amounts of money and city resources into making the community more bike friendly. More bikes mean more opportunity for bike thefts.

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Ashley Nobis, an avid Lakewood cyclist and a sales person at Spin Bike Shop on Madison Avenue, said she knows few bicycle owners who have taken the time to register their bikes.

Residents who register their bikes with the city receive a sticker to put somewhere on the frame. If a registered bike is stolen and recovered, the city knows where to return it, Hassing said.

The cycling community has it's own system of recovering lost and stolen bikes.

In a storage room at the rear of Spin, a corkboard wall is covered with emails and letters describing missing bikes. The store will contact the senders if someone brings one of the missing bikes into the shop, Nobis said.

Bikecleveland.org includes a form users can fill out to report stolen bicycles, and cyclists are encouraged to use forums to discuss missing bikes with other bike owners.

If cyclists see an unattended bike they know is stolen, they'll sometimes shackle their own lock to it and contact the owner, Nobis said.

Lakewood experienced more bike thefts in June and December of 2013 than Westlake and North Olmsted. The Northeast Ohio Media Group requested bike theft reports from those three cities as part of an ongoing series regarding common crimes.

Lakewood has a cycling culture rivaled by few other Northeast Ohio cities and having so many cyclists might contribute to an unusually high number of bicycle thefts in the summer when owners are more likely to leave their bikes outside and unlocked.

Ryan Sheldon, owner of Beat Cycles in Lakewood, said he's lived in big cities like Chicago but never saw such a high volume of bikes stolen until he moved to the Cleveland area.

Sheldon considered buying and selling used bicycles at his Detroit Avenue store, but decided against because he doesn't want to risk buying a stolen bike.

Lakewood residents cite the city's relatively small size, it's young population, and efforts by city officials to make the suburb more bike friendly when asked why so many cyclists reside there.

Lakewood's roads sit in a grid formation and are easy to navigate, said City Councilman Shawn Juris. That and Lakewood's small size make it ideal for cycling

The city started implementing a bicycle master plan in 2012 and making Lakewood more bike friendly. Juris said that the plan has contributed to an increase in the number of people who ride in the city.

"Lakewood was pretty far ahead (of other cities) in planning easy bike access," said Lakewood Mayor Mike Summers.

But Mary Louise Madigan, City Council president, said the plan started because Lakewood already had a large number of bike riders thanks to a younger population.

"There's a clear preference for cycling in the millennial generation," she said.

In Lakewood, bicycles are frequently stolen from front porches and out of open garages, according to police reports.

Most bike thefts are crimes of opportunity, Hassing said. A thief will see an unlocked bike and ride off with it, or someone with a pair of bolt cutters will cut the thinnest lock off a row of bikes in a public place.

Thieves don't appear to target any specific make or model, he said, they simply grab the bike that's easiest to steal.

Here are accounts of some thefts reported to police.

On June 23, 2013, a 16-year-old lifeguard at the Madison Park pool told police he locked his bike on the pool's bike rack when he arrived for the beginning of his shift. When his shift was over, the bike and lock were missing, a police report said.

A police officer watched tapes from a security camera pointed directly at the rack, but found the tape frequently skipped and had holes, the report said.

On June 21, a Lakewood woman told police her daughter's bicycle was stolen from the public park, a police report said.

The woman said she forgot to bring bike locks but was planning on watching the bicycle from the park, the report said. She said she took her eyes off the bike one minute and when she looked back, it was gone.

The same day another Lakewood woman told police her son's Schwinn bicycle was taken from her front yard.

"If people want your bike, they're going to get your bike," Landon Tracy, a manager of Eddy's Bike Shop in North Olmsted said.

But he said thieves looking steal a bike quickly target unlocked bikes or bikes with locks that are easiest to cut.

In the majority of bicycle thefts, the bike was not locked, according to police reports. Nearly all bicycle shops sell locks, and Tracy said around 40 percent of his customers leave the store with one.