Amsterdam opens largest underwater bike parking site

AMSTERDAM: Plagued by ever-shrinking space to park its hundreds of thousands of bicycles, Amsterdam opened Wednesday the first of its largest-ever bicycle parking complexes, built underwater in a pioneering engineering project.

The shelter is under the Open Haven Front, an access tributary to the city's IJ river, and will be followed by another next to the IJ itself that will open in February.

In the Dutch capital, they will have a combined capacity of 11,000 bikes.

The Amsterdam municipality said that 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 started in 2019 and involved draining part of the Open Haven Front next to Amsterdam Central Station.

A time-lapse video posted by the Amsterdam municipality showed how water was pumped out, the structure built and the area eventually flooded.

Vivianne Heijnen, Dutch deputy infrastructure minister, told AFP at the opening ceremony that we have a lot of knowledge and expertise when it comes to water.

She said the storage makes the best use of the space you have in a small country.

Conveyor belts take cyclists nine metres below ground level, according to wUrck, the architectural firm that designed the ultramodern parking spaces that aim to evoke their oceanic surroundings.

The cyclist steps into an imaginary oyster with a rough exterior of basalt and natural stone and a smooth, light interior, the firm said in a statement.

The city's transport alderwoman Melanie van der Horst said that you can immediately park your bicycle when you come to Amsterdam station.

According to the city's 2021 Bicycle Monitor plan, there are 900,000 bicycles in Amsterdam with some 625,000 trips daily. Finding the proper parking has been a big deal, according to the city's 2021 Bicycle Monitor plan.