Amsterdam has just opened two new bicycle parking facilities that can hold 11,000 bicycles just outside its Centraal station, where trams, Metro and commuter rail converge.
The city hopes it will eliminate both the harried scramble by commuters using bikes as the ‘first mile’ or ‘last mile’ of their commutes to find a parking space as well as eliminating the piles of bikes locked up everywhere when no space can be found.
The €85 million project has taken several years to build. A large basin used by canal boats arriving at the station was temporarily drained to allow one of the garages, largely built like tunnels off-site, to be buried; the other tunnel was sunk in water on the river side of the station. There’s even a plan, a few years down the line, to add another 8,500 spaces.
But, a problem remains, according Edwin Bollema, project manager: ‘Above the racks are row numbers and you see which row you are parked in, But you need to remember it!’
