When Maeve Thompson first moved to Gainesville, she saw a strange scene on 13th Street: a man riding his bike while carrying another bike, which she now assumes was stolen, on his shoulder.
It wasn’t Thompson’s last exposure to bike theft near campus. The 19-year-old civil engineering freshman said she has since seen many abandoned bikes, some with missing wheels or damaged frames.
Her observations reflect a broader trend. The UF student body isn’t unfamiliar with bicycle and scooter thefts; in 2024, there were 122 registered cases of bicycle theft and four of scooter theft. For 2025, as of mid-August, there were 38 bicycle theft reports, as well as four reported swiped scooters, according to data from the University Police Department.
The data, which encompasses August 2020 to August 2025, indicates thefts peak during the early Fall semester. The most commonly reported time of day for bike-related incidents is the afternoon, while the most common locations are Museum Road and central campus near Marston Science Library.
Thompson said she uses her own bike to travel from one class to another. She chains the front wheel to the frame and locks it with a U-lock to secure it.
However, on campus, she thinks her bike is mostly fine.“I think it’s going to be OK,” Thompson said. “There’s a lot of people; it’s daylight. Someone will know if someone’s stealing a bike.”
Total thefts tend to hover between 40 and 126 annually, with 2023 and 2024 tying at 126 thefts each. Broken down by month, September leads with an average of 15 thefts over the past five years. April and October follow, with an average of 12 thefts in both months.
Most bike and scooter thefts occur in the afternoon, between 12 p.m. and 5 p.m. The second-most common timeframe is in the evening, between 5 p.m. and 9 p.m., followed by the morning. Over a five-year period, just 61 thefts have been reported at night.
In the summer months, when most UF students leave, the campus sees fewer reported thefts; May, June and July fall at the bottom of the list.On Museum Road, where there is a lot of foot traffic between residential areas and lecture halls, 118 thefts out of 559 have occurred, according to the reported data.
Newell Drive, the road containing Marston Library, was the scene of 52 reports. Gale Lemerand Drive, which holds the New Physics Building, followed with a record of 42.
UPD advises to take extra precautions
UPD Capt. Trever Henderson wrote via email a common mistake students make is not locking their bikes or scooters at all, or using less-secure cable locks instead of metal U-locks.
Students should lock the frame rather than the wheel, he added, and remember theft can happen in familiar or well-lit areas.
Henderson also advised people to report thefts as soon as possible and register their bikes with UPD.“Without a serial number, the chances of recovery are low,” Henderson wrote.
UPD offers a free bike registration program for UF students, faculty and their family members. The department places a numbered decal, or “proof of membership,” on registered bikes, containing information about the bike and its owner.This way, an officer can determine whether found bicycles were stolen and return them to the rightful owners.UF Transportation and Parking Services and UF Surplus are responsible for removing abandoned bikes that don’t have decals.
If a bike is stolen from campus, UPD can use details about the bike, like its serial number, color, stickers and upgraded parts, to find it. It can also review available surveillance footage and report the bicycle as stolen into a database.
If the bike is recovered and registered with UPD, officers can contact owners using the information on the decal.
According to UPD data, on average, the department takes five days to recover a bike. A little over 200 of the bikes and scooters out of the 529 included in the five-year theft dataset were recovered on the same day, and 104 were found in one day.
The longest time it took to recover a bike was one year.
According to Henderson, thefts tend to increase at the start of Fall and Spring semesters, when campus activity is highest. Data indicates bike thefts are also high at the end of each semester, in November and April.
He also said electric scooters and improperly locked bikes are frequently targeted because they are easier to steal and resell.
Christopher Bowers, a 21-year-old UF computer science senior, works as a front desk assistant for the UF Bike Repair in the ground floor of the Reitz Union. Students often come into the shop, which provides free general maintenance to UF students, in order to report thefts, he said.
“We’ll talk to students, and they’ll tell us what previous bike of theirs got stolen,” he said.
Bowers, who often greets people from a swivel chair with indie music blasting over a speaker, once had his own bike stolen after leaving it outside Hume Hall overnight. It had been left locked with a cable lock, which Bowers said could be cut with “a $10 hand tool.”
He now keeps his bicycle in his dorm room.
Parking bicycles off-campus
Whenever Sydney Chin secures her bike outside of her off-campus home for the night, she double-locks it.
The 22-year-old UF aerospace engineering senior said the campus is walkable from where she lives, but she prefers biking because it cuts her commute time.
“I get to class a lot faster. I get home a lot faster,” Chin said. “I pretty much only ride my bike to go to class.”
Before bringing her dad’s mountain bike to campus, Chin read about bike theft in Gainesville. That led her to buy two locks — a U-lock and a flexible circular lock — to feel “extra safe.”
Connor Johnston, a 20-year-old UF biomedical engineering sophomore, parks his bike in front of Keene-Flint Hall on Friday mornings before his organic chemistry class. He bikes to campus three times a week because it's hard to drive there, he said.“There’s no parking available before 3 o’clock usually. Most of the lots are still full,” Johnston said.
If parking were easier to find, Johnston said he would drive, but he doesn’t consider the commuter lots a “safe bet.”
Since moving off-campus, Johnston brought his bicycle to Gainesville. In his hometown of Jupiter, Florida, he said he used it in mountain bike races. Because of the trail tires on his bike, he said it isn’t fast on the road.
But Johnston likes the extra cardio that riding his bike gives him.
“It’s peaceful in the morning; it wakes me up,” Johnston said. “It’s better than getting up and dragging myself to class. [I] get a little more activity in the morning.”
Contact Alanna Robbert at arobbert@alligator.org. Follow her on X @alannafitzr.
Alanna is a journalism senior and the Fall 2025 data reporter for The Alligator's Enterprise desk. She was previously a general assignment reporter for metro. Outside of reporting, she is found either with a book, in the gym or with friends playing pool.
