[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":128},["ShallowReactive",2],{"blog-content-en-Kt9mZ4":3,"blog-en-\u002Fen\u002F20260831-communal-bike-storage-apartment-buildings-undefined":118},{"id":4,"title":5,"author":6,"body":7,"date":106,"description":107,"extension":108,"image":109,"meta":110,"navigation":111,"path":112,"seo":113,"shortId":114,"slug":115,"stem":116,"__hash__":117},"blog\u002Fen\u002F20260831-communal-bike-storage-apartment-buildings.md","Bike storage in an apartment building (the shared room is required, so why does it rarely work?)","Tim de Booij",{"type":8,"value":9,"toc":97},"minimark",[10,14,17,20,25,28,31,34,38,41,44,48,51,54,58,61,64,67,71,74,84],[11,12,13],"p",{},"If you live in a flat, the bike has to go somewhere. Up the stairs and into the hallway. Chained to a railing out front. Or down in the shared bike room in the basement. Most new buildings have that last one, because they have to.",[11,15,16],{},"In the Netherlands a new home has to come with a lockable storage space you can fit a bike in. That rule sat in the old Bouwbesluit for years. It carried over into the Besluit bouwwerken leefomgeving, the building rules under the Omgevingswet. For an apartment block the developer can meet it with one shared bike room instead of a locker per flat. On top of that, the municipality usually sets its own fietsparkeernorm. That norm is often based on the CROW figures, which for homes work out to around two bike spaces per apartment.",[11,18,19],{},"So the room exists. It's on the drawings, it passed the check, and the keys went out on completion day. And then you go down there six months later, and it doesn't really work.",[21,22,24],"h2",{"id":23},"one-key-for-the-whole-building-is-the-problem","One key for the whole building is the problem",[11,26,27],{},"Look at what the shared room usually turns into. Everyone in the building has the same key or fob. That sounds fine. But count how many people that is. Plus their partners. Plus whoever they lent the key to. Plus the previous tenants who never handed theirs back.",[11,29,30],{},"A lock only means something if the wrong people can't open it. A door that forty flats can open is not that. Especially when it stands ajar half the time because someone was carrying groceries. Bike theft from communal storage is common for exactly this reason. The thief doesn't have to break in. They walk in behind you, or with a copied fob. And once they're inside they have all the time they need, because nobody down there is watching.",[11,32,33],{},"The room fills up the same way. Bikes that haven't moved in two years. A broken one nobody has thrown out. A flat that keeps three. Nobody tracks who has a spot or whether they still cycle. So the room reads as full on paper while half of it is dead weight. A new resident moves in, goes to park, finds nowhere to put the bike, and it ends up back in the hallway. Which is where the building manager didn't want it.",[21,35,37],{"id":36},"then-the-e-bikes-arrive","Then the e-bikes arrive",[11,39,40],{},"The rules were written for a rack of city bikes. That's not what people ride now. A lot of those bikes are e-bikes worth a couple of thousand euros. Some are cargo bikes that take up the space of two.",[11,42,43],{},"Two things break at once. The expensive bike is now sitting in a room a whole building can open, so that weak lock is suddenly guarding a lot more value. Then there's the battery. Left in a cold basement it loses range, so people carry it up to the flat. There they charge it off a socket in the hall. That's exactly what building managers have started banning, because a battery charging unattended is a real fire risk. Neither answer is good. And both land on the resident.",[21,45,47],{"id":46},"what-a-shared-bike-room-actually-needs","What a shared bike room actually needs",[11,49,50],{},"The list is short. Each person needs their own access, not a key the whole building shares. The room needs to close properly, not sit propped open all day. There has to be space for the bikes people actually own, e-bikes and cargo bikes included, not just narrow standard frames. And if there are e-bikes, there should be a safe place to charge that isn't a socket in someone's hallway.",[11,52,53],{},"That's more than the room the developer signs off, but less than tearing anything out. You don't need a new building. You need the room you already have to lock per person, to be managed by someone who can see what's going on inside it, and to take the bikes people ride today.",[21,55,57],{"id":56},"how-to-fix-the-room-you-already-have","How to fix the room you already have",[11,59,60],{},"This is the part we work on. ParkMyBike puts the access and the admin for a bike room into software instead of onto a key ring. It works with a shared room as well as with individual lockers.",[11,62,63],{},"For a building, that means the following. Each resident gets their own access from the app on their phone. There's no shared fob to copy, and nothing to chase when someone moves out. Their space frees up in the system the day they leave and goes to the next person, without a key ever changing hands. The manager, the VvE, or the housing provider sees the whole room from one dashboard: who has a spot, which spaces are actually in use, and where the dead bikes are sitting. Where the location supports it, an e-bike or an electric cargo bike charges behind a locked door instead of the battery coming up in the lift.",[11,65,66],{},"And it doesn't mean ripping out what's there. The system works with existing locks as well as our own. So a building can make the bike room it already has smart rather than starting over. We now run more than 300 subscription parking spaces across the Netherlands, Belgium, the UK and France. A fair share of them are exactly this kind of shared residential space. And the same app opens a locker at a station, a garage on a residential street, or the bike room under a block of flats.",[21,68,70],{"id":69},"the-room-on-the-drawings-isnt-the-room-that-works","The room on the drawings isn't the room that works",[11,72,73],{},"A new building comes with a bike room because the law asks for one. But does that room keep a three thousand euro e-bike safe? Does it have space for it? Can its owner charge it there? That's a separate question, and it's the one residents actually care about. The room is the easy part. Running it so it works is the rest.",[11,75,76,83],{},[77,78,82],"a",{"href":79,"rel":80},"https:\u002F\u002Fwww.parkmybike.app\u002F",[81],"nofollow","ParkMyBike"," turns secure, app-controlled bike lockers and garages into one parking system for cyclists, providers and manufacturers, and we're a proud partner of the Dutch Cycling Embassy.",[11,85,86,91,92,96],{},[77,87,90],{"href":88,"rel":89},"https:\u002F\u002Fwww.parkmybike.app\u002Fcontact",[81],"Get in touch"," if you manage a building and want the bike room to actually work, or find a spot near you at ",[77,93,95],{"href":79,"rel":94},[81],"parkmybike.app",".",{"title":98,"searchDepth":99,"depth":99,"links":100},"",2,[101,102,103,104,105],{"id":23,"depth":99,"text":24},{"id":36,"depth":99,"text":37},{"id":46,"depth":99,"text":47},{"id":56,"depth":99,"text":57},{"id":69,"depth":99,"text":70},"2026-08-31","New apartment buildings have to include a lockable room for bikes, but a shared berging with one key for everyone is where bikes get stolen and e-bikes don't fit. Here's what secure communal bike storage actually needs, and how to fix a room you already have.","md","\u002Fimages\u002Fblog\u002F20260831-apartment-bike-storage-problem.webp",{},true,"\u002Fen\u002F20260831-communal-bike-storage-apartment-buildings",{"title":5,"description":107},"Kt9mZ4","communal-bike-storage-apartment-buildings","en\u002F20260831-communal-bike-storage-apartment-buildings","RFioajrX8FrR-wqZSnJLya1jRdytIbZ3iPii2Eqabss",[119,120],null,{"title":121,"path":122,"stem":123,"description":124,"image":125,"shortId":126,"slug":127,"children":-1},"Secure bike parking at work (the part most offices still get wrong)","\u002Fen\u002F20260824-secure-bike-parking-at-work","en\u002F20260824-secure-bike-parking-at-work","More people are cycling to work than ever, but the office bike rack hasn't kept up. Here's what secure bike parking at work actually needs, and how an employer can offer it without building anything.","\u002Fimages\u002Fblog\u002Fparkmybike-ebike-charging.webp","wRb7Kp","secure-bike-parking-at-work",1788439656770]