Monitoring Desk
AMSTERDAM: Amsterdam Wednesday opened the first of its largest-ever bicycle parking complexes, built underwater in a pioneering engineering project.
Finding proper bicycle parking in Amsterdam has long been a headache as the city was plagued by ever-shrinking space to park its hundreds of thousands of bicycles. According to BBC News, the shelter has been constructed beneath the Open Haven Front, an access tributary to the city’s IJ river. It will be followed by another next to the IJ itself that will open in February.
Underwater bike garages’ capacity
Both parking lots will have a collective capacity for 11,000 bikes in the cycling-mad Dutch capital. The Amsterdam municipality said together the shelters will be the largest in the city with the Open Haven Front storage able to take 7,000 bicycles and the IJ-side site around 4,000.
Construction on the project started in 2019 and involved draining part of the Open Haven Front next to Central Station of Amsterdam. A time-lapse video posted by the municipality of Amsterdam showed how the water was pumped out, the structure built and the area eventually reflooded. This storage “makes optimal use of the space you have in a small country”, she said.
According to wUrck, the firm that designed the ultramodern parking spaces aimed at evoking their oceanic surroundings, conveyor belts take cyclists 30 feet below ground level. “The cyclists step into an imaginary oyster with a rough exterior of basalt and natural stone and a smooth, light interior,” the architectural firm said in a statement.
Now one can immediately park his bicycle when he comes to Amsterdam station, said Melanie van der Horst, the city’s transport alderwoman. According to the estimates by city’s 2021 Bicycle Monitor plan, there are around 900,000 bicycles in Amsterdam city with some 625,000 trips made daily while finding proper parking has long been a headache.
