Amsterdam, Netherlands – The Netherlands has more bicycles than people: an estimated 20 million bikes and just over 16 million humans. There are three times as many bicycles as cars.
Virtually every road has a bicycle lane. Virtually no one wears a helmet.
The bike garage at Amsterdam Central train station, which won an architectural award for its winding levels of bicycle stands that jut over a wide canal, is one of the country’s busiest. On a typical workday, 2,500 two-wheelers are crammed pedal-to-pedal, handlebar-to-handlebar on five soaring levels.
So it’s no wonder that Mireille, 39, couldn’t find her bike recently. “I thought it was right here.”
She paced the row where she was certain she left her bike. The row looked like an impenetrable web of spokes and bars and wheels. She started to offer her full name but thought better of it. She was embarrassed. She works for the city.
She confessed that she was in a hurry and double-parked, jamming her bike into the narrow space between two legally parked cycles. She was unable to wrap her lock around the bike stand. At Amsterdam Central, that’s an invitation to another bike owner to rip out yours and stash it in another illegal space 30 bikes away.
Mary Frances Cullen, 63, sees the lost- bike frenzy dozens of times a day. Unlike automobile drivers, cyclists don’t have keys with panic buttons. At Amsterdam Central, they have Cullen and her crew of bike attendants.
Cullen says her first question is always the same: “Have you looked around?”
“They say, ‘Yes, of course.’ I ask them, ‘What color is it?’ ‘Black, lady’s,’ they say. I tell them, ‘There are 2,000 black lady’s bikes here! Put something on the bike you can recognize – plastic flowers, ribbons, anything.’ ”
Some folks do that. They twist plastic flowers around the handlebars, they strap black plastic milk cartons to the back, they stick goofy cloth flowers to the seats.
Many lost bikes stay lost and become abandoned. Others end up that way because students go on holiday and leave their bicycles parked for months. People lose their keys and don’t go to the trouble of replacing them or cutting the locks. Others simply forget they left their bikes.
