Bicycle Insurance + Other Goodies

TECHNOLOGY - There are lots of companies out there offering car insurance quotes, but where are the companies offering bicycle insurance quotes? (Seriously, you can get pet health insurance these days, so it should not be too hard to get bicycle insurance.)

I did a Google search for "bicycle insurance" and there are 146,000 hits on the topic.

The top listing was a fellow who apparently does have bicycle insurance (listed under his tenants insurance) and he asked about insuring a bicycle for replacement cost. The insurance agent told him it would be $9.35 per year for every $100 value of bicycle.

Thus insuring a $2,000 bicycle for a year would cost him $187. Some other people have found cheaper rates. (See the full discussion on the TBN forum.)

Some insurance companies even offer advice for cyclists:
How to foil a bicycle thief
A stolen bike - to claim or not to claim

Obviously for theft purposes its best to just have the best quality lock(s) you can afford and always pay attention when locking your bike up so that its in a location that won't be easy to break / remove your bicycle. (I regularly see people's bicycles locked to poles that any reasonably tall person could just lift the bike up and off the pole and then ride away with it.)

If the lock is really good the insurance company should in theory lower their rates... but of course, if you have a really spectacular lock, doesn't that make insurance obsolete? You would hope so, but thieves will also see really expensive bikes as a bigger prize and try harder.

The whole thing got me thinking about niche markets for products/services cyclists would likely want or could use.

In theory there are a variety of things that cyclists should have... #1 accident insurance, #2. life insurance, #3. health/dental insurance... to say nothing of the niche markets available for cellphone, BlackBerry and laptop users. ie. A laptop holder for your bicycle, a place to put your BlackBerry, iPod, iPhone, etc... because talking on your cellphone whilst cycling is just plain dangerous.

For example here's a service some cyclists might like: ShrinkRay Mobile, its a mobile application developer for iPhones. Or for those organic food / ultra clean / botanical medicine people out there is companies like the Wellpath Clinic, a natural medicine clinic... which no doubt has products we could all use.

One of things I'd like to get is a video camera I can stick on the front of my bicycle. I found this website for Building your own Bicycle Camera Mount, but I'd much rather have something professionally made and pointed in the right direction (as opposed to limply hanging on with duct tape).

To paraphrase a fellow blogger "I want to see roads and faces, not the butts of bikers."

(If only Lenzr had video contests instead of photo contests.)

There are a LOT of Bicycle Gadgets out there, you just have to do a Google search for them.