It all started in 2019, when Bjartmar Leósson started to see a rise in bike theft in Reykjavík. Rather than accepting that once a bicycle was stolen it had disappeared forever, the bus driver and self-confessed “bike nerd” decided to start tracking them down and returning them to their rightful owners.
Four years and, he estimates, hundreds of salvaged bikes later, the 44-year-old has developed a reputation in the Icelandic capital among cyclists and potential bike thieves. Known as the Reykjavík “bike whisperer”, people across his home city turn to him for help to find their missing bicycles, tools and even cars. Often, he says, bike thieves hand over bikes without being asked and some former bike thieves have started to help him.
“It’s like a little snowball that got really big really fast,” says Leósson, whose other nicknames include “the bike cop”, “bike priest” and “bicycle Jesus”.
Now when somebody loses their bike it can take as little as 48 hours to track it down on his Facebook page, Hjóladót ofl. tapað fundið eða stolið (Bicycle stuff etc lost, found or stolen), updated every few hours with missing and found items and which has more than 14,500 members.
“It’s not only me,” he says. “Many times someone sees a bike hidden in a bush, takes a picture and then someone else comments ‘hey that’s my bike’. So everyone’s looking out.”
While not a globally renowned cycling city, two-wheeled transport is on the rise in Reykjavík, which has a population of 139,875 people. Through its new cycle path system, the city aims to increase the share of cycle trips to at least 10% of all journeys made by 2025.
In the last three years there has been a steady reduction in bike theft in the city, according to police statistics, falling from 569 in 2021 to 508 the following year and 404 in the first 11 months of 2023.
“Bjartmar Leósson is doing a great job finding and collecting bikes that have been stolen,” said the Reykjavík police chief, Guðmundur Pétur Guðmundsson. “Police often guide victims of theft to various sales groups and his [Facebook] group just to increase the likelihood to find the bike a gain.” All bike theft reports were investigated, he added.
While Leósson’s investigative work is now altruistic, anger was a strong driving factor when he first started. He began taking bikes to the police after seeing what he believed to be stolen items outside a homeless shelter and admits he would confront and argue with the people he believed responsible. Now, he empathises with them.
“At first I was very shocked and angry at the situation,” he says. “A lot of bikes outside the shelter, a police car driving past, no one doing anything.
“I was very angry, they were angry – it was very rough at first. But then I started to think: OK, it doesn’t matter, I can scream until I’m blue in the face, nothing’s going to change. So I decided to try to level with them and just talk to them.”
From that point, the dynamic changed. He started to become friends with residents of the shelter, some of whom started to help him track down bikes. Some of those, he says, he helped into rehab and the impact on Leósson himself was life changing.
Now when people’s bikes get stolen, he says, the police direct them to his Facebook page. When there is a finder’s fee he gives it to people living in the shelter. He he says he now sees the bike theft problem is often driven by addiction, aided by long rehab waiting lists and closures during the summer.
His passion for bicycles started as a young child riding his first tricycle down the street and as a teenager he started mountain bike racing and getting interested in vintage bikes.
The first time he had a bike stolen, he says, he felt “like somebody had just punched me in the stomach”. But he also remembers thinking that it was not an unsolvable mystery. “I thought to myself: OK, your bike is out there somewhere, it’s a needle in a haystack … but this haystack is not that big, this is Reykjavík. And I decided: I am going to find my bike.”
He put notes through neighbours’ doors and before long he had a description of a person believed to have been seen with his bike in the city centre. “Every single day I thought to myself: today is a good day to find my bike.” And one day he spotted somebody on his bike, stopped him and got it back.
But his approach since then – when he was “stubborn and maybe a bit loud” – has changed dramatically. “Now when I see these guys on a stolen bike, I just talk to them very peacefully and calmly. The other day I talked to one of these guys and didn’t even mention the bike, I just basically said: tell me your story,” he says. At the end of the conversation, the man handed him the bike.
While cycling is on the rise in the city, he says, bike theft can put people off using bikes in place of public transport because they are afraid to leave them out locked up – and can stop them cycling entirely. “Some people have switched from car to bike, and when the bike gets stolen and the police seem to do nothing about it, then they go just back to the car.”
