Amsterdam’s New $65M Underwater Bike Garage Isn’t Even the Biggest in the Netherlands

How many bikes on the racks?

There are some good things about life in America: gas is cheap, potatoes taste better and you’ll struggle to go a day without seeing a Ford Mustang. But then, it also has its drawbacks: cross-country trains are basically unusable, there’s no easy access to a Greggs and everyone seems happy to walk down the street and pay to do their laundry. Weird.

But one of the biggest flaws in America is its reluctance to properly invest in cycling infrastructure across its cities. This is a fact that becomes painfully apparent when you look across the Atlantic to The Netherlands.

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This tiny country, which has an economy roughly 25 times smaller than the U.S., has just opened the doors to a new $65 million underground bike store. It’s an incredible site that has space to park 7,000 bikes right outside Amsterdam’s central station. And, perhaps the most interesting thing about the new site, it’s almost entirely underwater.

According to Bloomberg, the new bike store in the Dutch capital has been in the works for four years. This rather satisfying time lapse shows that its construction involved draining a section of Amsterdam’s famous canal, before assembling the garage and then re-flooding the area. It’s all mighty impressive. Bloomberg reports:

While all that was going on, access routes to and from the station remained open, meaning Dutch travelers and commuters could carry on with their journeys as normal.