The bike parking lots are generally located in extremely convenient places such as next to train stations, or near large squares. In the Netherlands, there are a lot of places that you can't park your bike, unlike in the US where you can just lean it against a wall. As you can see in the video, most of these parking lots feature the double level racks. It was hard for me to understand why this was necessary before I moved here from the US, but if you ever travel to the Netherlands, you will be amazed by the amount of bicycles. Being able to fit 2x as many bicycles in the same square footage is 100% necessary.
200+ bikes are removed per day at Amsterdam's central train station for being parked outside of the designated bicycle parking areas (e.g. sidewalks, bridges, alongside the walls of the station). Even within the designated areas, you usually have to be parked in a bike rack or your lock will be cut and the bike removed.
At busy stations it would be great to know which one of the designated spots you should bike towards. Biking farther away and walking for 3 minutes is much better than guessing incorrectly, searching for a spot for 10 minutes, and still having to walk for three minutes... especially when you need to catch a train!
Probably because your country doesn't have as many bikes as Netherland does.
In most places in Netherland, parking wherever you like is no big deal, but there are places (train stations in particular) where bikes really need to be restricted, or there'd be no room for anything other than bikes.
It's the same as with cars: the occasional randomly parked car is not a big problem, but once you've got thousands of cars being parked all over the place, it becomes time to restrict them to designated parking spots. It's no different with bikes, except you need a lot more bikes to get to the point where they become a problem. Dutch cities have that many bikes.
You can lock your bike however you want, but any experienced thief can remove those locks within minutes. No reasonable priced combination of locks keeps a thief from taking your bike.
Luckily there are so many bikes in Utrecht and Amsterdam and especially around Central Station (10-20k), that chances that they take your bike are really low. Then if you use a good lock, one that takes an extra minute to break, and if you put your bike in a good location, you're relatively safe.
However, this works opposite by not hiding in the mass. The thief hides in the mass, as bikes themselves don't flee the scene when a thief is in sight. So the trick is to find a good place for my bike. As I have a fragile racing bike (old and cheap but technically in good condition), those massive outdoors parking systems are not good places. People pull and push to get their bikes out, and a racing bike wouldn't survive that for long. So I find places where my bike is safe.
It's always fun to see that I park my bike in an empty spot, and after an hour or so the space if filled with other bikes.
During my student days, I always made sure to check if the bike rack had a bike that looked prettier than mine and had worse locks.
Now that I ride a much more expensive cargo bike, I don't worry about it anymore, and it hasn't been stolen yet. Are cargo bikes less attractive? Hard to believe, but it seems to work.
