Vacant lot full of frames, wheels and gears draws attention to bike theft in Saskatoon

It looks like an especially messy bike repair shop.

There are piles of dozens of multi-coloured frames.Stacks of wheels, mounds of tires. Plastic crates filled with silver parts.

But it's not a repair shop. The bike parts are strewn across the ground and in the trees at a vacant lot on Avenue V South in Saskatoon.

Police say they're aware of the site, but they're not entirely sure what's happening there.

"As we became aware of this it was sent to both our Patrol and Investigative areas. As a standard, we encourage the public to report any sort of suspicious activity to police," said police spokesperson Easton Hamm.

Bike theft is an issue in Saskatoon. There is a Facebook page, "stolen bikes saskatoon," with 3,200 members who post advice on avoiding thefts and photos of stolen wheels.

The advocacy group Saskatoon Cycles has a newsletter that encourages people to register their bikes with thecity police.

According to statistics from police, the average number of reported bike thefts has been about 800 a year since 2019. To date this year, 426 bikes have been reportedmissing.

Michelle Bullee is a mechanic at Doug's Spoke and Sport. CBC showed hera video of the site.

"The immediate thought is there's a lot of stolenbikes here," she said.

"In my experience as a bike mechanic, I've seen situations like this where the thieves take bikes and swap out parts, either because something wasn't working or because itstarts to make the bike look different.

"And when somebody has a stolen bike and they give a description to the police, that's what they're looking for. So I've seen cases where, you know, they swapped the wheels, they swapped the seat, they swap out other components and they're either upgrading their bike or they're making it unrecognizable."

Bullee saidthe way that the various parts are sorted into piles suggests that the site has customers who would come looking for specific parts they might not normally be able to afford.

"We do see a lot of people come in for, let's say, a flat repair, and there's mechanisms on their bike that need to be replaced," she said.

"They don't have the money to fix it, so they might go somewhere like that."