City of Bicycles

Posted by Deirdre Oakley, AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS – There are 700,000 bicycles in Amsterdam, a city known as one of the most bicycle-friendly in the world. That’s one bike for every two people living in the city, posing smog-free traffic congestion challenges unheard of in car-centered urban America. Pictured here is the very crowded fietsenstalling (bicycle garage) at the city’s Centraal Train Station. For a small fee bicyclers can park here, and over 100,000 do every day. With four stories full of bicycles crammed together in seemingly endless rows, let’s hope forgetting where you parked is not a common occurrence.

Deirdre Oakley is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Georgia State University and Editor of Social Shutter. You can contact her at doakley1@gsu.edu. To view more City of Bicycles photographs, log on to our Facebook page.