Last summer, the last day of my idyllic French holiday was ruined when a similar-minded bicycle collector cut through the massive lock which attached our bicycles to the back of the car and disappeared without trace.

Determined not to let these blackmarket bike thieves ruin my earnest cycling intentions, I have reinvested in a pedal-powered machine and cycle to work undeterred. But I reasonably expect my bicycle will at some point be targeted yet again . . . because the inescapable and somewhat inexplicable truth is that people love to steal bikes.

In a few months' time, Dublin should play host to a community bike scheme.

You will rent a bicycle by signing up to the scheme online, take it from a pick-up point and drop it off at your destination. The scheme is already up and running in France in both Lyon and Paris, where it has been deemed a resounding success. But how will it work here?

In 1993, Cambridge University decided they would have a go at giving students access to 300 free bicycles to get around. Within one hour, all of the bicycles were stolen. In Amsterdam, a similar scheme in the 1960s involved a cunning plan to make the bicycles as unattractive as possible to prevent their theft. The population rebelled against the horrible bikes and threw most of them in the canals.

The Parisian Velib scheme is only three weeks old and while most are taking to it with ordered gusto, so far 180 bicycles have been vandalised and 50 have been stolen.

Perhaps the advertising company behind the plan, JC Deceaux, are hoping the Irish are entering into a new green patch, whereby we won't be tempted to reef the bicycles from their moorings at 3am on a Sunday morning on Dawson Street. Frustrated at not being able to get a taxi and having 'forgotten' to sign up online to the scheme, will the strong men of Dublin be able to resist stealing their way home from its berth and later dumping it in their back garden?

A cynical cyclist might say it'll never work, but maybe, just maybe, in voting the Greens into government we have also voted for a new era of communal pro-environment activity and will use and not abuse our free bicycles.

Unfortunately, so serious is the problem of bicycle theft in this country that former minister for justice Michael McDowell planned to set up a special garda task force to examine the problem. But alas, the task force, like McDowell's political career, appears to have disappeared in a puff of smoke.

The theft of the two-wheeled wonder is a crime that has been around since the first hardy cyclist pushed off on a penny farthing up a steep hill on a frosty morning. They are easy to steal and easy to sell.

Indeed, Green Party leader John Gormley's bicycle was stolen as he canvassed during the recent election campaign.

But flooding the market with community bicycles might just take the heat out of the black market and result in harmony for paranoid cyclists who endlessly search for the nonexistent theft-proof lock.

Most cyclists have tales of woe when it comes to vandalism or the spiriting away of their mode of transport, so perhaps we should all welcome this ambitious new plan with open arms.

And while I don't harbour any hopes of seeing my sister's poor old blue bicycle ever again, I am looking forward to the moment when the thief of said bike won't have to carry a chainsaw with him to secure a way of getting around but can simply rent a bicycle instead.