Investing in infrastructure: Bike parking garage is built under Amsterdam canal

Every city should treat its bikes and their riders so well.

In Toronto where I live, it took six years, many political battles, and $2.5 million, to build parking for 170 bikes in an existing parking garage. And it looks like a parking garage. That’s C$14,705 per space.

In Amsterdam, it took four years, 60 million Euros or C$90 million to build 7000 bike spaces UNDERNEATH a canal. It’s gorgeous. And it is C$12,857 per space. How can they do such a thing? And why?

How they did it was amazing. As the time-lapse shows, they built coffer dams to keep the water out, drained it, poured the slab on the new grade, installed champagne flute shaped precast columns and then a new slab. They put in beautiful lighting, including backlit art pieces running around the perimeter. “Travelators” or sloping moving sidewalks bring bikes and their owners up and down. According to Bicycle Dutch,

“Making the facility comfortable to use was also a main point of the design. The parking facility is located deep under the surface and that could make it unattractive to use. Bringing in daylight and using bright, high-quality materials should give the inside of the bicycle parking facility a pleasant and welcoming feeling.”

“To make it easy to know where you are the main path of the parking has been designed as a ‘colonnade’ (a path between pillars) which connects to a direct underground connection to the metro station and from there to the train station.”

The Toronto parking garage costs $26.91 to join and $21.53 per month to use. The Amsterdam underwater garage costs… nothing. if you leave your bike there 24 hours there is a charge of about C$2 to discourage people from storing bikes there for too long.

Why would they spend so much money on a bike parking garage? According to Chris Bruntlett, there were so many bikes being parked around the station that it was getting hard to walk anywhere and it had to get cleaned up. Thomas Ricker writes in the Verge about these surface bike parking lots:

“While the largest of these is so massive that it’s become a tourist attraction in its own right, locals consider them smelly monuments of frustration that often lack any free spaces due to a high number of semi-abandoned bicycles. As a result, regular commuters risk impoundment by locking their bikes to nearby trees, street lamps, and signposts, or by leaving them on any slab of available concrete which increases their chance of theft.”

Bruntlett notes that it’s all part of a continuing campaign to give people alternatives to driving. 81% of the Dutch population lives within 7.5 km of a train station so it makes sense to combine commuter trains with bike parking at either end. Half of the people who take commuter trains bike to the station.

Meanwhile, in Ontario, the government builds “free” car parking at GO commuter train stations at $40,000 per spot, and is committed to building 3500 more per year. Sean Marshall notes that they cost about $200 per spot per year to maintain. There is a logic to the Dutch model.

There are critics of the parking garage. Bicycle Dutch notes that the travelators are so slow that by the time you get off, “your clothes are out of fashion.” Standing on it, we had to squeeze to the side so that cyclists could get by walking their bikes down. When they conceived it in 2016 they made no provisions for charging e-bikes or any spaces for cargo bikes, which will both be accommodated in the next garage- plans are for a total of 20,000 spaces in total.

But by thinking big, the Dutch are able to build a stunning garage that connects directly to the train station (imagine this under Union Station in Toronto) for less per bike than a conversion of a garage in Toronto. Under water. Instead, we build elevated highways for 3,000 cars per day. Perhaps it is time to rethink our priorities and our ambitions.

I am in Amsterdam as a guest of Gazelle, who made this beauty. I visit the factory tomorrow.