Bikes in the Netherlands

For the firstcomers to the Netherlands, the large amount of bikes everywhere is one of the things that surprises you quite a lot. Actually, everybody has at least one bike and you really use it. The country is so much comfortable with one! In every street, there is a bike lane and sometimes two, one for each riding sense. There are even bike roads which connect cities! The are parallel to the normal road or highway and sometimes they are really really wide.


Well, the view of a bycicle parking lot near a train station is one of the coolest things of the country. Check this one some weekends ago in Delft:




The problem is that there are so many bikes that yours can get stolen easily in the huge mess a parking lot is. Besides, they have to put up with the "nice" Dutch weather and the "nice" drunk people. If you are unlucky, you can easily get your wheels bent or removed... In the worst case, if your bike is near a canal, it can end up at the canal's bottom.



The other day waiting for the bus to go to ESTEC I saw this funny boat removing all the bikes from the bottom of one of the central canals in Leiden. If you check carefully you will see there is a small crane to pick bikes out of the water!