In my experience, there is not enough proper bike parking in Dutch cities to avoid “wild parking”. A space in a bike rack will almost always be preferred to a random pole.
Indeed. Even though there’s a lot of bike racks. I feel that we need at least three times more. Also, many people have 2 or 3 bikes parked in different stations and other bikes get abandoned in the parking place. I think they should start checking that bikes are not parked in a spot more than 30 days.
2200 cases in a whole year in a Dutch city of 120000 people seems low. I am almost certain I see more than 2200 cases of car parking violations in a year just personally and I am working home office.
Instead of trying to tackle the real issue: “why people park their bikes where they shouldn’t?”. They decide to tackle the symptom… That’s your average politician.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Officials in the Netherlands, a country with more bicycles than people, are tackling a plague of “wild parking” by confiscating illegally stationed bikes and increasing the penalties to get them back.
This year the southern city of Maastricht – beloved of international students – banned people from “orphaning” their bikes by deserting them on the street.
To be legal, cyclists in the inner city must park at a bike rack – securing it to railings or a lamp-post is a no-no.
“But on the other hand, this sometimes brings problems in public space … and this decision is because the number of incorrectly parked bicycles remains too high despite all efforts.”
But Mark Mülders, the head of the GreenLeft local party, is concerned that the penalties could be counterproductive.
“I would rather that they get a fine for incorrectly parking their car than their bike because everyone who cycles has made a contribution to a car-free inner city.”
The original article contains 374 words, the summary contains 158 words. Saved 58%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
I can see why abandoned bicycles would be a problem. If they put up a notice that they’ll clean up a street from all bicycles in a week, there should be no issue.
They should install Sheffield racks everywhere. It is, after all, the superior design for bicycle parking.
Well, what they use a lot in the Netherlands is a two floor bike rack. Something like this: https://images.app.goo.gl/7JBUFp6PnARhSKkX6
I think Sheffield racks are superior from a usability-standpoint, and potentially from an affordability-standpoint as well. They may be worse from a space-efficiency standpoint, however.
I think you don’t get the amount of bikes on Dutch roads we use front wheel stanyd like these:
Sheffield style tracks would be flooded and bikes jammed everywhere in between.
I realise that there are a lot of bikes in the Netherlands. I know bike theft is also a pretty big problem. Introducing some Sheffield racks could go some way to mitigate the issue.
I imagine there’s still a not-insignificant amount of car parking that can be removed to make up for the relatively larger amount of space that the Sheffield racks require.
