Every now and then a tractor with a trailer drives towards the station in Assen to take away all illegally parked bicycles. It doesn’t help much, the municipality notices. A day later there are ‘normal’ bicycles again.
The electronic sign on the bicycle cellar under the station shows a large number on Friday morning: 1393. There is still room for that many steel horses in the inn, dry, guarded and free for the day. It’s just a matter of pushing your bicycle in, scanning your public transport card, parking your bicycle and walking towards the platform.
And otherwise there may be a hole in one of the many stables on the other side of the tracks, the Assen-Oost side. Plenty of room, in any case. Yet almost every day dozens of two-wheelers are parked in front of the station building, where it is forbidden to park bicycles.
Annoyance about steel lying around
Many residents of Assen are annoyed by all that steel lying around. Residents of Assen regularly call or email the Miniman by Dagblad van het Noorden to express their dissatisfaction. A persistent resident, who lives near the station, wrote several letters to the municipality to draw attention to the bicycle chaos.
The complainants believe that the appearance of the new – and award-winning – station building is being ruined. In principle, a certain pride is inherent in that annoyance. Because as one complaining Assenaar said last week to the Miniman : “The new station building has a beautiful appearance, but the bicycles are standing and lying in front of it and are annoying and spoil the image. A mess.”
‘Storage is filling up’
The municipality recognizes the persistent problem of illegal parking in front of the station. “It is a point of attention internally, but there is not immediately a ready-made solution,” says spokesperson Laurent Dwarshuis. According to him, the Asser enforcement team regularly removes two-wheelers lying around. That happened again on Friday, September 22; then forty pieces were taken away on a trailer.
These bicycles go straight to the municipal yard on the industrial estate. There, residents of Assen can get their bicycle back for 25 euros. “Bicycles remain there for a maximum of three months. The storage is already getting quite full,” says Dwarshuis. It all doesn’t help much. Exactly a week after the removal of forty bicycles, dozens of them were ‘normally’ next to each other again.
Prohibition signs everywhere
It is not the case that Assen residents do not know that bicycles are prohibited in front of the station: there are almost as many prohibition signs around the building as there are illegally parked bicycles. But apparently those warnings don’t stop people from parking their bicycles in a bicycle rack. Illustrative of the situation is a pair of bicycles that were parked on Friday morning on a ‘prohibition sign’ sprayed on the street paving stones.
The employee of the guarded bicycle cellar, which has room for 2,500 bicycles, does not understand it. “Most people know that there is a bicycle shed here, but somehow some people are in a hurry.” He shrugs. “By the way, most people just park their bikes neatly.”