04.19.08
Bicycle life
Reality Based Community has an interesting post on the lousy bicycles used in the Netherlands—a country where the bicycle is a major mode of transportation.
I sent the link to a friend who lives in Amsterdam, and here’s his response:
Amsterdam has an official population figure of 750,000, but I would guess that there are maybe 50,000 illegals living here, people who are not registered. (We have civil registration, & everyone is supposed to be recorded in the computer system.) Every year, at least 50,000 bicycles are stolen in this city. Late one night I actually saw a bike thief in action. He got through the locks (you never have fewer than 2 when you park) in maybe 30 seconds.
The answer the fellow got when he asked why the Dutch ride such junky bikes was the right one: good ones are prime targets for theft. People do have good bikes; there are more bikes than people in this city. We have 3 for the 2 of us. People use their good bikes when they know that they are not going to be leaving them anywhere for any length of time, even though one is foolish not to lock one’s bike, even if one is just getting off to buy a newspaper.
There are places in A’dam where you can go & expect to find one or more people selling a bike for very little money. You know, of course, that it was stolen. True, the Dutch tend to be law-abiding citizens, but there are always kids who will take a bike if they can, & there are junkies who feed their habit with the money they get from selling stolen bikes. A few years ago I saw a couple of barges on one of the city canals. One had a crane on it. It was fishing near a bridge, picking up what was left of bikes out of the canal & depositing them on the other barge. They were the remains of stolen, then cast-off, bikes.
The fellow who wrote the article relied more on what he thought should be so than what actually is. That happens a lot, I suppose.
What would help is a large underground automated bicycle parking lot: your bike goes in and is protected until you return to withdraw it. Like this:
Steve said,
20 April 2008 at 7:26 am
The daughter who lived in Holland for two years has made her pronouncement on Reality Based Community’s comment: “That guy’s just plain wrong! And he’s obviously never lived in Holland! First, the crackheads will steal anything, regardless of how little its worth”. And Holland’s liberal drug laws make for a prodigious “unofficial” population of drug tourists and residents who make their living stealing anything that isn’t nailed down.
But here’s my own simple answer based on very limited observation from my visits to her. The Dutch actually live on their bikes…its not about “sport and recreation” like it is here in North America. The bikes are left outside in the frequent rain, sometimes for days or weeks on end, as people hook up with other transportation such as trains. When my daughter would attend her twice yearly archaeological digs in Greece, she would leave the bike chained to a lamppost outside her apartment building for 2 months! Clearly, expensive, lightweight, “quality” bikes would rust-to-dust under these conditions…not to mention being stolen almost immediately. Your friend in Amsterdam is, I believe, right on. Some people may have terrific uber-bikes but you likely won’t see them jostling for space on the incredibly crowded bike paths where speed isn’t even an option.
Denny, Alaska said,
20 April 2008 at 7:54 pm
A very informative article; thank you. Let me take exception to thing your Amsterdam friend wrote, please. The residents of that city are *not* “…law-abiding” citizens as he/she seems to claim, if indeed bicycle theft is such a problem. If one can’t leave their bicycle unattended for even the short amount of time it takes to purchase a newspaper, well, no, there’s certainly not a theme of law-’n-order coursing through the streets.
We here in the U.S. seem to generally filter news from Europe differently than that which we read/view anywhere else. Europe is always held to be less-violent, less law breaking than the U.S. Having lived there for several years (Germany and England) and traveled extensively throughout the continent, I’m always cautioning my fellow Americans to “think differently” when it comes to elevating Europe over the U.S.
Bicycle theft stories from Amsterdam only reinforce my point.
LeisureGuy said,
20 April 2008 at 8:44 pm
Well, we don’t have to make guesses and assumptions based anecdotal accounts of bicycle theft. We can look at crime statistics. For example, the following are figures from 1991:
Prisoners (per 1,000 people):
4.2 United States (in 1991; currently more than 10 per 1,000)
1.0 United Kingdom
0.8 Germany
0.7 Denmark
0.6 Sweden
0.4 Japan
0.4 Netherlands
Murder rate for males age 15-24 (per 100,000 people):
24.4 United States
2.6 Canada
2.3 Sweden
2.3 Norway
2.3 Finland
2.2 Denmark
2.0 United Kingdom
1.2 Netherlands
0.9 Germany
0.5 Japan
The above are all 1991 figures, but I believe that the US still is far ahead of Europe in armed robbery, murder, rape, people in prison, and so on, on a per capita basis.
But perhaps you are referring to some other statistics? Could you provide a link? I believe that Europe is held to be less violent and less law-breaking than the US because that is in fact the case.
Sorghum Crow said,
21 April 2008 at 7:15 am
I loved the Japanese parking garage, I saw similar ones when I lived in Japan.
The Japanese are also a law-abiding group in general, but the two things that will get stolen are bicycles and umbrellas. I think borrowing might be a better term, I imagine most bikes are borrowed on an as needed basis, then abandoned.