An earlier version of this article was published in April 2017.
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Talking about bicycles and Amsterdam has become a cliché: there are so many and they are everywhere that the mere image of the city has become permanently associated with its figure. And that is very good: bicycles are very useful for urban mobility, reduce congestion and are friendly to the environment. Hence, many cities around the world are following suit. A happy arcade on two wheels.
Or maybe not so much?
There are always dark sides to the socio-economic utopias of northern Europe, whose exemplary progress seems to have been achieved by pedaling on a bicycle. And the one in Amsterdam is simple: although almost all the residents of the city have bicycles, the robberies and the vandalism They are an endemic problem in the city. According to some estimates by the authorities, between 50,000 and 80,000 vehicles are stolen each year in the city, more than half of them at the door of their homes. A nursery of thieves.
And one might think, why does anyone need to steal a bike in Amsterdam if they are so cheap and ubiquitous? Given the annual explorations of Waternet, the company dedicated to the maintenance of the city’s various canals, the answer lies in the water: many of them end up in the channel bottomvegetating until the gigantic ship-cranes that patrol the city deign to pick them up on a daily basis.
Give me a bike and I’ll throw it into the canal
Yup: There is nothing more characteristic of Amsterdam than a bicycle, but if we had to find a competitor, the canals would be close behind. The country that won the battle against the sea is delighted with its canals, and Amsterdam, its capital, has hundreds of them. Specifically 165, which add up to around 100 kilometers of small stagnant and navigable waters that also delight tourists… and thieves.
According to Waternet estimates, around 15,000 bicycles of the canals of Amsterdam per year. Given that most of their owners have no special interest in throwing them into the bottom of the water, the operators in charge of recovering them believe that the phenomenon is due to theft and noble acts of vandalism (it is not a minor problem: people in the Netherlands when goes drunk tends to fall into the gutters).
Hence, it is common to run into these friendly workers in many Dutch cities. Their barges, with crane At the head, they cross the waters of the canals in search of prizes to put in their mouths. The end result, after digging into the bottom of the shallow waters, are piles of junk coming out of the water like a Decepticon, misshapen monsters piled up together and rusty from the elements.
As explained in this report, the canals had historically served as a municipal landfill. Long before public sanitation systems, the inhabitants of Amsterdam threw any kind of thing that hindered them into the bottom, including garbage or, when his reign came, bicycles. Hence, today Waternet has to frequently clean the bottom: in the ’60s, bicycles became such a problem that they prevented the correct navigability of ships, in addition to the dubious health of the phenomenon.
Since then the fishing of bicycles is another element related to the landscape of Amsterdam (and that can be replicated in other cities), and the theories about the theft-throwing of bicycles into the canal are varied: from people who get tired of their bicycle (in bad condition, it can cost more to repair it than to buy a new one) even thieves who, once their journey is complete, decide to dispose of the stolen item in the best possible way.
The magnitude of the phenomenon? 15,000, as we have already said. It seems like a large number (per year, no less), but it is worth putting it into perspective: it is estimated that there are about 840,000 bicycles in Amsterdam, practically one per inhabitant (850,000). Around the 1.7% of the total They end up being fish food.
More serious is the issue of theft. An estimated 311 bikes are stolen every day across the Netherlands, with cities like Groningen accounting for around 17 bike thefts per 1,000 inhabitants. In 2014 alone, the Dutch police added more than 110,000 complaints for bicycle theft. It is a possibly hidden problem: a large part of the thefts are not reported because the police cannot investigate all of them. Especially if the proof of the crime ends up, as we have already seen, in the background of the channels.