SubjectiveAlbatross

SubjectiveAlbatross t1_j676p5v wrote

>just that it's a lot for a underwater bike garage...that seems very impractical. You can easily store bikes at home, and it allows instant access to the bike. You can also check his edit and he clarifies his issue with it.

Which is all complete nonsense.

This garage is not a replacement for home storage – they're not stupid. Perhaps you didn't read the article beyond the title, but this is a garage at Amsterdam's central railway station. It's intended to (1) hold one's bike when one rides to the station to take the train, or perhaps more commonly given its city-center location, (2) hold one's second commute bike. That's a thing because there isn't enough room for everyone to take their bicycles onto the train. Many people thus have one bike they keep at home to ride to their local train station, and then another at the station near their workplace to complete the commute once they get off the train.

60 million Euros is not crazy for these large and highly-trafficked facilities (underground bicycle garages of comparable sizes in Utrecht and Den Haag in less challenging geology/geography cost 30-50 million), and not even remotely enough to "revamp every bike stall in the country" when there are 23 million bikes there.

It's not "a trek" nor "inconvenient" nor "impractical", because again you're not walking from home to this garage just to ride around the neighborhood, and also because it's right in front of the station it serves, connected directly with a tunneled passage. He's fabricating drama without knowing anything about the garage or the country.

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SubjectiveAlbatross t1_j64u9nl wrote

It's a bit more than 15% (and probably higher once you account for all the supporting infrastructure and induced sprawl). Moreover the "it's only xx%!" schtick is itself disingenuous. I've seen an Australian argue for example that "we're only responsible for 1%, we shouldn't have to do anything!" (completely ignoring in that case their high per capita emissions), the problem being that if you take these locality/sector exceptions to the full logical extent then nearly everything is exempt and very little gets done. 15% is a significant slice of the pie, and there's very little else that's "much bigger".

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SubjectiveAlbatross t1_j64n9cm wrote

€60 million is an absolute bargain for something this big, right in the heart of the city too.

Edit:

>is a trek to and from the facility

It's literally under the canal directly in front of the station square, and has a direct tunneled passage into the station. Around 150 meters center-to-center.

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