Netherlands opens world’s largest bike parking garage

In the Netherlands, where bicycles outnumber citizens, bike parking is serious business. The country just opened the first phase of what will soon become the world’s largest bike parking garage—a 184,000-square-foot space beneath Utrecht’s central train station, capable of holding 12,500 parked bikes by the end of next year. While a cause for celebration, the Dutch reaction to the new garage hasn’t been entirely positive, with critics saying that it simply doesn’t go far enough to accommodate the country’s volume of cyclists.

“They have been talking about updating the city since 1989,” said Martijn van Es, spokesman for the Dutch cycling organization Fietsersbond. “The infrastructure hasn’t changed enough. And there are a lot more cyclists today than there were, [and much of the infrastructure] was built in the 1980s.”

The average Netherlands resident bikes more than 600 miles a year, and over a quarter of the population bikes to work, according to The Guardian. There have also been sharp increases in biking in the country’s urban areas in just the last 15 years. Today, 40 percent of those arriving at Utrecht’s train station got there on a bike.

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Tatjana Stenfert, project manager at Utrecht station’s square, told The Guardian they’re already looking to add even more bike parking to the area: “We will have 12,500 places by the end of 2018. But then we will have to do some research and find more places for the bikes. It never stops. I look around and everyone is trying hard to find spaces – trying hard and fast.”

Via: The Guardian