BIKEPGH MESSAGE BOARD ARCHIVE

Utrecht Central Station, the Netherlands.

i was in amsterdam about a year ago, there's so many bikes. here's 2 pictures i took outside centraal station.

http://www.kelly-and-justin.com/images/album/SpringBreak/amsterdam.jpg

http://www.kelly-and-justin.com/images/album/SpringBreak/amsterdam2.jpg

If I decide to renounce my citizenship I think the netherlands is where I am going to try and go!

I could never imagine having to say something like "Yeah, it might take me an extra half hour or so to meet you because I am havinga hard time finding a place to park my BIKE..." while living here in Pittsburgh!

Any country where bicycles, weed, and other things frowned upon here in the "land of the free" are fine and dandy seems cool with me LOL...

The video might be Leipzig.

Years ago, I felt like an iconoclast because I was the only where I parked at Pitt that had fat road tires, fenders, racks and a kickstand on my bike.

It would just baffle me that there would be a rack full of $$ moutain bikes and $$$ racing bikes. Great for goiu8ng 5 miles as fst as you can or for riding off the edges of cliff, for sure. All of them suck for commuting in the rain.

But I had my doubts.

I mean, most of the time when you feel that everyone ELSE is weird and fuct up? Um... well ... you know.

Then I went to Leipzig, Germany, where the university has a building that could be the one in the video - just filled with thousands of bikes with fenders and racks and big road tires.

Leipzig was former East Germany where most folks with a second language knew Russian. Their English was not good.

Delightful miscommunication with a woman at the hotel desk when I asked about finding a place to rent a bike. "You can not rent bicycle."

The hotel had bikes for their guests, but it took a lot to figure that out. (50 Euros was a deposit, not a rental fee, etc).

The woman thought I was kidding her when I said that in the US, hotels don't have bicycles for their guests. I totally convinced her I was a liar by saying, "Maybe there are a half dozen hotels in the whole country at resorts that have bikes for their guests." (There might be a hundred or so now, but then, 6 was probably a good estimate.)

And when you come down to it, she was right. Any decent hotel would have bicycles for their guests, wouldn't they? Wouldn't they?

And when you come down to it, any large university in Europe would either have a bike parking area like the video or maybe a dozen different areas, each with a few hundred rack spaces. If you have 15 thousand students, faculty, and staff, you are going to have 4 to 8 thousand bikes.

You can't lock them all to parking meters.

Mick

Funny... I get bent at times as to how unfriendly this country can be in general to bikes... We went from horses to cars with the bicycle being some weird thing that came out as a toy for kids to play with...

How many people in america remember that the wright brothers were bicycle mechanics when they invented the airplane?

The guy who shot that video told me himself it was shot in Utrecht, but like you said, it may as well be anywhere in the world but the United States. I don't think you would see that many bicycles at a bicycle convention here in the states!