Chicago D.O.T cutting bike locks?

Saw this on www.reddit.com/r/chibike Figured I'd give people a heads up here.

"This morning on my commute to work I saw a large City of Chicago DOT truck and some workers using a cutting torch to remove the u-locks from every bike that was locked up to the bike racks on the NE corner of Adams and Canal and then they were loading the bikes into the back of the truck. Anyone know why or what is happening to these bikes? It was probably 15 bikes in total from what I could see. Kind of alarming if you ask me because I could not see anything wrong with the way the bikes were locked up."

http://www.reddit.com/r/chibike/comments/180uqn/chicago_dot_cutting...

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Permalink Reply by 1zt7hr8qm0y90 on February 12, 2013 at 1:16pm

Are the owners of these legally parked and locked bikes being compensated?

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Permalink Reply by Charlie Short 2.9 on February 12, 2013 at 7:31pm

We do abandoned bike removal about once a month, and sometimes we take a little longer to collect the bikes after they are tagged (they need to be tagged for at least a week before we can remove them.) This last collection was about 45 bikes. We actually tage the bikes in two places, just in case someone removes the tag (along with other parts of the bike, as Howard suggests.)

All of the bikes and frames are taken to Working Bikes and held for 30 days. Occasionally, a bike is mis-identified as abandoned and it gets removed. If this happens, you can contact our office and we get the bike back from Working Bikes. This is generally a problem when people go on vacation and they have impatient neighbors. I'm only doing abandoned bikes for a short time (until March,) but you can contact our office if you have questions about this.