Bike theft on the rise at BART stations

Jay Fraser knows what it's like to lock a bicycle at a Bay Area Rapid Transit station and return to an empty rack.

Fraser is a research analyst for the Administrative Office of the Courts in San Francisco and has commuted by bike for 20 years, 10 of them in the Bay Area. He had a bike stolen at the Pleasant Hill/Contra Costa Centre BART station and a seat stolen at the Walnut Creek station.

Like Fraser, hundreds of other commuters have parked a bike at a BART stop and returned to find it gone or stripped of parts.

The Walnut Creek and neighboring Pleasant Hill BART stations are the top targets for bike thefts, a California Watch analysis of BART crime data shows. From 2006 through October 2011, the two stations accounted for more than 430 thefts of bicycles or bicycle parts, nearly 17 percent of the thefts in the entire system. Stations in higher-crime areas in Oakland and Richmond had lower theft numbers.

Read the complete story at California Watch. California Watch, the state’s largest investigative reporting team, is part of the independent, nonprofit Center for Investigative Reporting. For more, visit www.californiawatch.org.