thumpism 

I heard on NPR today a promo for a program ("Tell Me Now" I think it was) featuring a story on guys on the Amsterdam crew that pulls bikes from the city's canals. Did some Googling and found a link and got a snip, and they evidently take 12,000-
15,000 annually, the results of theft and vandalism.

https://www.pri.org/stories/2015-07-1...its-fish-bikes

oddjob2

You're sure it's not due to cannabis?

thumpism 

I ain't sure of anything.

exmechanic89

Wow, what a crazy article. Such a waste of resources, even if the vast majority of the bikes are junk. Recycled or not.

3speedslow

I've seen those videos, blows my mind. Others that rock are those that show the lost and found - reclaim lots they set up, thousands of bikes just piled into neat rows going nowhere.

Sad when you think of it. It's the two extremes, us and them.

CliffordK

What the water doesn't destroy with the bikes, the claw surly does destroy.

I suppose if one's bike is stolen in Amsterdam... one just needs to go for a swim to recover it

I wonder how many people just snag a bike, ride it home, then dump it, leaving the owner walking.

davester

That's amazing. I asked my wife (a city planner who has put together several city bicycle plans and has been to Amsterdam) to guess how many bikes they retrieve a year. She said 65. The answer, 15,000 per year, blew her mind.

non-fixie 

We've got a very small country, and with 20,000,000 bikes and 17,000,000 inhabitants things just tend to overflow into the canals.

Italuminium

Estimates say that one bike a person is nicked in Amsterdam every year, but few people bother to report. The dump and dash is a well established practice, as is just dumping a bike because of a dinky chain or even a flat tire. Replacing a city bike for €30 at your local junkie is much cheaper than having a flat fixed or a new chain fitted.

People that say that shifting to a bike culture cures consumerism, technical incompetence, wastefulness and all kinds of bad human behavior are pleasantly naïve.

wrk101

I thought Europeans were green. What happened to recycle/reuse/repair? I'm not encouraging theft, but why not leave it on the street somewhere or on a bicycle rack to let someone else use it, or better yet, let the owner recover it?

Italuminium

We ain't. Well, a lot of "abandons" get recovered by monthly purges: city workers attach labels to handlebars of bikes that haven't moved in a while, than remove them after a month or so. they also tow bikes parked outside of racks, requiring long treks to dumps at the edge of town.

Some of the bikes are salvaged, sent to Afrika or fixed up by ex-cons, recovering junkies or handicapped persons in work schemes to be sold at cheap rates, but there are a lot more wrecks than salvages, to be molten down. So yeah, there is recycling, but it's a wasteful system. Stil better than nothing, though.

JohnDThompson 

Many years ago, I bought some Zeus parts from a seller in Amsterdam. They looked awful in the pictures, and I got a really good price as a result (why don't sellers put a little effort into cleaning things up before selling them?). When they arrived, it looked like they had been dredged off the bottom of a canal, which is probably what happened. But they cleaned up nicely and I've been riding on them ever since.

3speedslow

I appreciate your insight on this, I also know you don't claim to speak for your whole country but your points are interesting.

I imagine the bikes that get nicked are the ones that have the police tags on them ?

If I was to buy a cheap bike at a junkie just to get around, I could see not being too upset when it goes away, maybe a little. bUT... To find my cherished,coveted ,passed down through the Family bike nicked would get me boiling.

Are bikes there something passed down through the Family ?

juvela

they probably make great homes for the eels...

Vieux chnoque

First off Amsterdam is not the Netherlands, it is an open air asylum with the doors unlocked.
We do have cherished bikes, but I wouldn't let those out of sight even for a minute, they are meant for riding, not parking, then we have clunkers to ride into town chain to a post and we are not to upset about a scratch or a bent wheel.

ramzilla

Most people in the USA couldn't possibly fathom the bike culture that exists in Amsterdam. Everybody rides. Everybody.

Italuminium

I certainly don't and remember, Amsterdam is not like the rest of the country at all. The problem with bikes gets progressively worse as towns grow.

And the ones that get nicked certainly aren't the ones with tags on them - many of these are already out of commission. It's mostly comes down to locks and the chance of getting caught, obviously.

Sure, bikes are passed down, but many people have "nice bikes" to ride to work if a safe bike rack is present and the bike can be locked up at home, providing to safe points of parking, and off course road bikes, especially the nice ones, get just as much care as anywhere else. But for the pub bikes, or "stationsfietsen" (bikes used for gettting to and fro the train station, to be locked outside in huge bike pens) fate can be rough

rhm

I took this photo some years ago in Leiden.



I don't want to pretend I understand the role of cycling in European countries like the Netherlands and Germany, because even though I've lived there, it kinda mystifies me. Yes, people ride more, but they don't ride better bikes. There are guys that ride seriously, but they don't seem to make up larger proportion of the population than they do in the US. There, as here, a substantial proportion of the population can't fix a flat tire, and don't own a wrench; but of those people, far more of them ride bikes in Europe than they do here. And they ride mostly low end department store type bikes. There used to be a huge semicircular space in front of the train station in Leiden that was devoted to bicycle parking; and most of the bikes there appeared to be derelict. Among those thousands of derelict bikes, there were a few genuine interesting antiques; but most were bike boom department store junk and in terrible condition.

geehue

Here in Ottawa our problem isn't bicycles in the canal; it's the cyclists themselves:

Cyclist rescued after falling into Rideau Canal, sinking with bike - Ottawa - CBC News

3speedslow

Do you think all those people are just trying to rehydrate their leather saddles ?

3speedslow

All very interesting and informative ! Thank You for your take on this.