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This must be the world's most famous bicycle parking facility.
But it is an end-of-journey facility.
To make cycling really convenient you need parking at the home end of the journey too.
If you only visit the centers of Dutch cities,
with older homes and lots of bicycles out in the streets,
you might think that is the way the Dutch generally store their bikes.
Endless rows of bicycles in front of older houses and even the smallest of
bikes attached to a post.
But that is not the full story.
In reality
most Dutch bikes sit indoors,
in small private storage facilities like these.
That you can find near apartment buildings or homes.
In fact building regulations dictate that every home built after circa
1950
has to have storage space,
large enough to store several bicycles,
indoors, dry,
and secure.
most homes have these little storage buildings in their back garden.
A corridor, behind the houses
gives access to them.
Later, the public access was usually closed with a separate door to keep unwanted persons
out of these corridors.
This is the house I grew up in
and this mid 1960s home has a brick storage space.
Here I demonstrate with my sister in the 1970s how easy it is
to park my bike here.
The open-air facilities for apartment buildings of the 1950s
evolved to closed areas like these.
Behind the closed doors are the private storage rooms for all the different apartments.
They are large enough for several bicycles and other items
you would keep in a space like this.
The even newer apartment buildings have these rooms completely indoors,
usually in the basement.
All you see from the outside is only a door.
These racks are just for visitors.
They would never be enough for all the students living here.
This door gives access to a private underground bicycle parking facility.
And getting in with your bicycle
is sometimes not the easiest thing to do.
So you really only seen bicycles in the streets in the older neighborhoods.
Where in the place of a single car, racks now provide parking space for many
bicycles.
To shield the bikes, some municipalities install covered racks.
A parking spot in one of these bike boxes, that can be locked,
can be rented from the owner of the box
A more traditional way to store bicycles in older residential areas
is the neighborhood bicycle parking facility.
That the largest cities have had for many years.
The boss has gone,
you know park your bike yourself with your own key.
During a brief period around the turn of the century,
the regulations for bicycle storage were lifted but that soon led to inferior
solutions to park bicycles.
These facilities
offer only little protection against the weather and theft.
And for some buildings there were only racks out on the street.
That is not the situation that was wanted by most cities
so the building regulations were quickly reinstated.
These new homes have an indoor bicycle parking facility.
Upstairs is the living room
and on the ground floor extra door next to the front door gives access to the
spacious room to park your bicycle.
So the streets look neat and tidy again.
It is a bit different in the older residential areas.
But with some effort it can look good enough, even there.