As an inveterate car driver, I hate bicycles. They're a damn nuisance, and are usually propelled by suicidal maniacs whose sole aim in life is to break as many traffic regulations as possible on a given stretch of road. Car drivers in Naples (Italy, not Florida) are more disciplined than cyclists in Holland. More on driving a car in southern Italy some other time.

Anyway, there are lots of bicycles in the Netherlands. Way too many. But I am beginning to understand the death wish of the cyclists themselves, as there seems to be something supernatural going on. It seem that about 900,000 bicycles are stolen every year in this country. Estimates for the total number of bicycles in the country vary from 16 to 20 million on a population of 16 million. So that means that between 4.5% and 5.6% of all bicylces get stolen in any given year. But that's not all: there's an additional 1 million bicylces sold every year. Does that mean we are adding a million new bicycles to the overall stock every year? The link above is not clear on whether it's a million new bicycles, or whether it includes used ones as well; given the rest of the page, it would seem to refer to new ones. And where do the 900,000 stolen bicycles go? There must be some regurgitation of these bicycles back into the overall stock, rather than just ending up in the blind alley of illegality. It still leaves us with a huge new supply of bicycles every year. Since there is little growth potential left (I would think the market is fairly saturated), there must be a large amount of bicycles disposals. Or the stolen bikes are exported, but I don't see the economics of this working too well.

Very puzzling. Back to the original story. It also refers to the futility of reporting a bicycle theft, and only 1 in 5 victims bother to go to the police. At police stations, there's a form for submitting a claim to the insurance company. (Hm, insurance fraud inflating the numbers?) But help is at hand: after three years of negotiations no less than three ministries and various organizations have come to an agreement on a concerted effort to combat bike theft. All new bikes will be fitted with a chip that can be scanned. Once a bike is stolen, its chip code will be entered into a national database, so that police can easily scan "suspicious" bikes and determine whether they're stolen or not. Of course, the police have also said they're not going to spend any time or manpower on this, as they're busy combating more serious crime. Except they're not doing too well on that either.