April 26, 2018

So many signs, still many bike removals

Filed under: Bicycles by Orangemaster @ 2:08 pm

Bike-signs-Leidseplein

Downtown Amsterdam near the Leidseplein, one of the main party areas, a total of 54 bright signs asking folks to remove their bikes before April 23 was not enough to make it happen, forcing the city to remove 115 bikes.

A few of my Facebook friends took pictures of the sheer amount of signs they saw while biking, cracking all the jokes. However, the city is legally obliged to put signs at pretty much every bike rack, which would explain why there are so many. We also know how annoying it is to have to deal with the bike depot folks who remove ‘wrongly parked bikes’ due to a lack of bike racks in the first place and bring them to a bike purgatory 10 kilometres away from the city centre.

(Link and photo: at5.nl)

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December 1, 2014

Abandoned bikes to Jordan, almost as far as depot

Filed under: Bicycles by Orangemaster @ 11:38 am

Sending hundreds of bikes to Syrian refugees in Jordan sounds like a great way to clean up the clutter caused by abandoned bikes in Amsterdam. The idea isn’t new, as the city of Amsterdam said this summer that it wanted to send 10,000 bikes to Jordan. Bikes are useful for transporting large objects and can be converted into many things.

Having tens of thousands of abandoned bikes in a city of some 813,00 inhabitants makes it sound like we grab a bike and leave it on the street every time we go out. The bike depot, a ‘refugee camp for bikes’ that were parked illegally yet often removed incorrectly by the ‘bike police,’ is so far away that people cannot be bothered and just use another bike. It’s not a very green attitude, but it does save time and money.

If the city would just lay off people’s bikes unless they were really abandoned carcasses with no wheels left, that could be a good start. If the city would build more bike racks, that would help considering the current depot system apparently runs at a loss. If that depot wasn’t so ridiculously far away or there were a few smaller ones, that would help. So go ahead, ship a bunch of ‘abandoned’ bikes to Syria (or talk about it for months) instead of fixing the real urban problem, that’s the ticket.

(Links: www.dutchnews.nl, www.parool.nl)

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