How to park your bike safely at the station when theft keeps rising

Leaving your bike at the station is one of those small daily gambles most cyclists stop noticing. You lock it, walk to the platform, and hope it's still there when you get back. For a lot of people, often enough, it isn't.

Bike theft in the Netherlands has been going up for several years now. Police registered somewhere around 87,000 reports in the past year, but that number only tells part of the story, because plenty of people never bother to report a stolen bike at all. Insurers and cycling organisations put the real figure much higher. Stations and busy shopping streets are among the places where it happens most, which makes sense: lots of bikes, lots of people passing through, and a rider who is gone for hours.

So the question isn't really "should I lock my bike" anymore. It's "where do I leave it so it's actually still mine tonight."

A rack does less than you'd think

The default at most stations is an open rack, sometimes under a roof, sometimes not. You clip on a lock and go. It's better than nothing, but not by as much as people assume.

An open rack leaves the whole bike exposed. A thief can see exactly what's there, take their time, and work on the lock or just lift off whatever comes loose: a saddle, a light, a battery. Cable locks in particular come off in seconds, and even a decent U-lock only buys time. Time is the one thing that helps, but on a quiet rack at the edge of a car park, there's plenty of it.

This is also why the shift to e-bikes and fatbikes has made things worse. Those bikes are worth more, and the battery is both valuable and easy to walk off with. A rack does nothing to hide any of that.

Even guarded parking isn't automatic safety

The usual advice is to use a guarded bike shed where you can. That's fair, and a staffed shed genuinely lowers the odds. But it's worth being honest about the limits. Bikes still go missing from guarded and enclosed facilities. A shared shed is still a big open room where anyone with a ticket can wheel a bike out, and a busy attendant can't watch every stand at once.

"Guarded" is not the same as "yours alone." That gap is exactly where a lot of station thefts still happen.

What actually changes the odds

The thing that makes the real difference is putting the bike somewhere a thief can't see it, can't reach it, and can't linger over it. An individual locker does all three. One bike, one closed door, no view of what's inside and no way to get a tool onto the frame or the battery.

That's the idea ParkMyBike is built around. Instead of an open stand or a shared room, you get your own enclosed locker that you find, reserve and open from the app on your phone. The bike sits behind a locked door the whole time, out of sight and out of reach. At many locations you can charge an e-bike while it's in there too, so the battery isn't a reason to lug it onto the train with you.

We put these lockers where the daily gamble actually happens: park and ride sites, carpool spots, and bus, train and metro stations. That's the whole point. The moments people feel least sure about leaving a bike are the moments a proper locker is worth the most.

Where you'll find them

This isn't a pilot. ParkMyBike now runs more than 300 subscription parking spaces across the Netherlands, Belgium, the UK and France, with the first locations dating back to 2016 in Fryslân. From a metro stop in Nissewaard to park and ride locations across Drenthe, Groningen and Friesland, cyclists reserve and unlock a locker straight from the app, leave the bike behind a closed door, and get on with the rest of the trip.

For a municipality or a transport hub, that's also a quieter way to make cycling to the station feel like a safe choice rather than a risk. People cycle more when they trust their bike will be there later. A locker is one of the few things that earns that trust directly.

Park at the station without the gamble

ParkMyBike turns secure, app-controlled bike lockers and garages into one smart parking system for cyclists, providers and manufacturers, including locations right where you catch your train.

Schedule a demo to see how ParkMyBike can bring safe, app-controlled bike parking to your station or location, or find a spot near you at parkmybike.app.