For the 8th Time, Lawfulness Is Gone With the Schwinn

Living in an urban area means amassing stories of urban hardening -- personal affronts that make you question humanity, like being scammed by a flimflam artist, or witnessing a mugging on your block, or having your bicycle stolen.

By this rationale, Lukas Kohler, an economist with the Treasury Department who lives in Columbia Heights, is one of the most urbanly hardened individuals in Washington.

He has had eight bicycles stolen.

It has become a saga of escalating security, thinning patience, increased anger and diminishing faith.

The first two disappeared from inside Kohler's garage in 2007, shortly after he and his wife moved into the neighborhood. The garage did not have a traditional pull-down door, but rather a barred metal gate that folded back. The garage was shut. The bikes were wire-locked to Kohler's motorcycle. The thief wriggled in through the gate and committed the ultimate indignity: He rifled through Kohler's garage toolbox and used Kohler's own electrician's wire cutters to liberate the bicycles and ride them away. "It must have taken them 20 minutes to cut through the locks," Kohler says, flabbergasted. "It's crazy, thinking about it."

He bought a super-hardened U-lock for the garage. He thought he'd solved the problem.

Bicycle thieves, the most heartless of criminals, the lowest of the low, have been known to do crazy things. Last year, District police ran a sting operation on H Street NE, putting two "bait bikes" on the sidewalk and nabbing anyone who took them. The bicycles were stolen five times in one hour. This is the craziness of bicycle thieves. Steal them right in broad daylight. Assume if it has wheels, it's meant to be rolled away. The National Bike Registry estimates that more than 1 million bicycles are stolen every year nationwide.

Kohler's third bicycle theft happened when he was out of town. His wife, Lucrecia, was home alone and noticed that the backyard gate was open. Lucrecia went to close the gate and found one bicycle there, instead of in the garage where it belonged. Their other bicycle was gone. Lucrecia brought the remaining bike into the kitchen, then watched from the window as a man approached the gate and peered over it. He looked confused and disappointed. Lucrecia reported the theft to the police, as the Kohlers say they have done for every missing bike. The bike was never recovered.

Why does it hurt so much when a bicycle is stolen? It feels personal. It feels like someone stealing your photo album, or your favorite armchair. "The bike has very little material value but a great amount of sentimental value," a distraught Craigslist poster wrote yesterday, hoping that someone had seen his stolen bicycle. Sentimental value. Would you ever describe a stolen television or an iPod that way?

The thefts don't make sense to Kohler. Not to the bicycle-loving part of him and not to the economist part of him, either. "It's a cost-benefit analysis," he says. Thieves sell these bikes on the street for $50, $75 bucks. Is it really worth breaking the law, he wonders. (Clearly, it is to the bicycle thieves.)

After the third bicycle disappeared, Kohler hired a wrought-iron fencemaker. The fencemaker made a keyed gate to the rear entrance of the garage. As further protection, Kohler mounted slabs of plywood to cover the folding garage door, figuring that what the thieves couldn't see, they couldn't covet.

Then he and Lucrecia left town for a holiday, leaving the house in the care of friends visiting from Germany. One afternoon, the friends left to go to the post office. When they returned, the plywood was gone. So was the door: It had been ripped off its hinges, presumably by a car or a truck. Four bikes were missing -- the Kohlers' and the friends'.