Croats Bike Register Hopes To Go International

Two passionate bikers, and Zagreb Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing graduates – Ivan Hamonajec and Danijel Šaško, have come up with a revolutionary way to lower the rate of bicycle thefts and to track owners of stolen bikes.

The pair’s new bike registry Bicreg is now already available on their website https://www.bicreg.info/hr/ which enables bicycle owners to register their bikes online using the frame number (usually situated between the pedals on the bottom of the frame).Until now, when police found stolen bicycles (around 750 bikes are stolen per year in Zagreb alone), it was a difficult task finding the bike’s owner, meaning most of recovered bikes were then sold at public auctions. With Bicreg, police will be able to find the owner and return their bikes to them.

Similar registers have been done before, but those were local and weren’t computerized, whilst Hamonajec and Šaško hope that their project will cover bikes both nationally and on a regional level. “We see no obstacles in Bicreg becoming an international register and that information can be exchanged on a regional level”, said Šaško and Hamonajec to daily Jutarnji list.

That might just be so, because in just a couple of months since they started, around 1000 people from all over Croatia have registered their bicycles. Cyclists are a very homogenous, benevolent group of people. There is a sense of solidarity among them and noone is going to buy a bicycle if they know it is stolen, said Hamomajec.

The registration is free, while for 30 kunas (4 EUR) Bicreg also offers a sticker (with a QR code) that can be placed on the frame, as a warning to potential thieves, or as a trace to the owner, if the bike is stolen. So far Bicreg is a non-profit project and it’s goal is only to attract as many bicycle owners as possible.