[rogeryu]

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.

[errtnsd]

Interesting. Certain animals use herding, the same strategy, against predators.

[rogeryu]

Yep, that's exactly my strategy!

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.

[mcv]

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.