Bike thefts are concentrated broadly along Yonge Street south from Bloor Street to Lake Ontario, an analysis of police bike theft data from 2014 to 2024 shows.
The city's bike theft centre is in an area covered by six shapes on our map, from Nathan Phillips Square east to the Toronto Metropolitan University campus, which saw 1,253 bike thefts in the period, or about one every three days.
The data only covers bike thefts that were reported to police.
Here are the hot spots:
- Near and around Yonge and College, in a shape that includes Toronto Police Services' headquarters
- On Bloor Street roughly between Bay Street and Jarvis Street
- An area near King and Dufferin
- Along King Street East between Jarvis and Parliament
- Around Church and Wellesley
Click on a shape to see details.
For map display reasons, we're only able to show the downtown core and neighbourhoods to the east and west. This means the map above shows 24,227 of the 38,647 bike thefts in the data.
Hot spots we're not able to show include the area around Yonge and Eglinton, and Colonel Sam Smith Park in Etobicoke.
It's difficult to establish whether a given bike is more at risk because it's locked up in a high-theft area. We don't know how many bikes are vulnerable to being stolen at any given place, of which a percentage are in fact stolen.
However, a look at concentrations of bike commuters from the 2021 census implies that many of these bikes are stolen from people who have them locked up in an exposed area or in an improvised situation. Bike thefts are concentrated in the core, while bike commuters usually start commuting into the core a kilometre or two outside it.
