AMSTERDAM - About 6:30 weekday mornings, throngs of bicycles, with a smattering of motor scooters and pedestrians, pour off the ferries that carry bikers and other passengers free of charge across the IJ harbor, clogging the streets and causing traffic jams behind Amsterdam's main train station.

"In the afternoon it's even more," moaned Erwin Schoof, a metalworker in his 20s who lives in the canal-laced center of town and battles the chaos daily to cross to his job.

Willem van Heijningen, a railway official responsible for bikes around the station, said, "It's not a war zone, but it's the next thing to it."

This clogged stream of cyclists is just one of many in a city as renowned for bikes as Los Angeles is for automobiles or Venice for gondolas. Cyclists young and old pedal through narrow lanes and along canals. Mothers and fathers balance toddlers in spacious wooden boxes affixed to their bikes, ferrying them to school or day care. Carpenters carry tools and supplies in similar contraptions and electricians their cables. Few wear helmets. Increasingly, some are saying what was simply unthinkable just a few years ago: There are too many bikes.

In a city of 800,000, there are 880,000 bicycles, the government estimates, four times the number of cars. In the past two decades, travel by bike has grown by 40 percent so that now about 32 percent of all trips within the city are by bike, compared with 22 percent by car.

Many Amsterdamers say it is not so much the traffic jams that annoy them most, but the problem of where to park their bikes once they get to where they're going.

"Just look at this place!" said Xem Smit, 22, who for the past year has struggled to maintain order at a municipal bike parking lot in the heart of town, waving a hand at bikes chained to lampposts, benches and trees.

"I hear complaints all the time," Mr. Smit said. "It's not bike friendly - no!"

Thomas Koorn, of Amsterdam's Transport and Traffic Department, said that over the next two decades, the city will invest $135 million to improve the biking infrastructure, including the creation of 38,000 bike parking racks "in the hot spots."

"We don't think there's a crisis; we want to keep it attractive," Mr. Koorn said. He paused, then added, "You cannot imagine if all this traffic were cars."

Part of the problem is that many Amsterdamers are not satisfied with just one bike, and often do not care where they leave those they have.

Commuters like to drop their bikes close to the station before jumping on a train, often just chaining them to lampposts, Mr. van Heijningen said. Workers remove about 100 such bikes every day, hacksawing through chain locks, he said.

Still, no one dreams of limiting bike use. Musing over why Amsterdamers are so keen on bikes, Michel Post, an official with the Fietsersbond, the Cyclists' Union, attributed it to the country's density. "Our country is small," he said. "And the whole country is flat, and the climate is not extreme. We're really lucky."

The New York Times

(China Daily 06/30/2013 page10)