Amsterdam has roughly 940,000 residents and, by most counts, more bicycles than people. What it doesn’t have is a clean answer to where all those bikes go when they disappear — and a surprising number of them do, by three different routes: theft, the canals, and simple abandonment. Each has its own machinery for dealing with the wreckage, and each machinery has been studied closely enough that the numbers are worth laying out properly.
How many bikes actually get stolen
Ask how many bikes are stolen in Amsterdam each year and you’ll get three different answers, and all three are defensible. MIT’s Senseable City Lab, in a 2023 study run with the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions and TU Delft, laid the range out explicitly: around 11,000 bicycles are reported stolen to police each year, the city’s own estimate for actual thefts runs closer to 28,500, and cycling advocacy groups put the real figure as high as 80,000. The gap between those numbers isn’t a data error — it’s underreporting. Nationally, Statistics Netherlands’ Safety Monitor found that only about 40 percent of Dutch bike-theft victims bother filing a police report at all, typically because an old city bike doesn’t feel worth the paperwork.
The reported figure, at least, is precise and current: Amsterdam police logged 10,810 bike-theft reports in 2024 and 10,920 in 2023, which puts the city well clear of every other Dutch municipality — more than double the runner-up, The Hague, at 4,760, and more than the combined reported thefts of five entire Dutch provinces. Amsterdam’s own Court of Audit, using police open data, estimated the real annual figure at closer to 28,000 bikes stolen a year across 2012–2019, a number that barely moved despite a decade of city anti-theft measures — engraving programs, a dedicated depot, register checks — while the national reported-theft count fell by a third over the same stretch.
Where a stolen bike actually goes
The most interesting recent research on Amsterdam bike theft didn’t come from police data at all. In 2021, researchers from MIT, TU Delft, and the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions fitted GPS trackers to 100 ordinary second-hand bikes and chained them up at twenty of the city’s known theft hotspots, then watched what happened over six months. Seventy of the hundred were stolen — a higher rate than the city average, likely because every bike in the study sat somewhere fully public. What the trackers showed afterward surprised even the research team: 68 of the 70 stolen bikes never left the Amsterdam area. Fabio Duarte, the study’s co-author at MIT’s Senseable City Lab, said the group had expected some bikes to be shipped abroad; instead, most simply re-entered circulation locally, often strikingly fast, suggesting a market that is less an organized export racket than a fast, local, and largely informal churn — a bike gets cut loose, ridden a short distance, dumped or resold, and picked up again by someone who may have no idea it was ever stolen.
Why so many end up in the canals
Then there’s the fraction that never gets ridden away at all. Amsterdam’s 165 canals, stretching roughly 100 kilometers, hold a genuinely startling number of sunken bicycles — enough that the city holds a Guinness World Record for it. Waternet, the regional water authority, dredges between 12,000 and 15,000 bikes out of the canals every year using a floating crane fitted with a claw, a process that has become an accidental tourist attraction in its own right. Waternet’s own assessment is that the vast majority of canal bikes arrive there through theft or vandalism rather than accident — a thief’s fast way to strip a lock and dump the evidence, or simple drunken mischief on a Friday night. Whatever their condition when they’re pulled out, canal bikes don’t get a second life: everything Waternet recovers is scrapped for metal, not resold or returned.
The abandoned-bike problem: Amsterdam’s Fietsdepot
The third category is the largest by volume and the least dramatic: bikes that were never stolen or drowned, just left. Amsterdam’s Fietsdepot — the municipal bicycle pound — took in roughly 70,000 bicycles in 2023 that were judged illegally parked, left in the same spot too long, or visibly wrecked. By 2024, city officials told Parool the number was heading toward 100,000 a year against a facility built to handle 75,000, forcing the city to cut the reclaim window from six weeks to four and shift the cost of retrieving rental-scheme bikes onto companies like Swapfiets rather than the city. Reclaim rates are low and appear to be falling: bikecity.amsterdam.nl put 2023’s reclaim rate at roughly 30 percent, down from the 49 percent an older survey had found. Unclaimed bikes in reasonable shape are auctioned or donated to social workplaces; the rest is scrapped. One detail worth sitting with: the depot and the police share data specifically because a meaningful share of “abandoned” bikes are actually stolen bikes a thief rode a short distance and left, meaning some of the Fietsdepot’s inventory and the MIT trackers’ “68 that stayed local” are almost certainly describing the same underlying behavior.
How Amsterdam compares
Bike theft scales with how much cycling a city actually does, which makes comparing Amsterdam to a car-dominant city of similar size mostly beside the point — the more useful comparison is against cities with an equally serious cycling culture.
Copenhagen is the obvious match, and the comparison holds a real surprise. The Danish capital’s police statistical area — Copenhagen, Frederiksberg, Tårnby, and Dragør combined — has about 837,000 residents, close enough to Amsterdam’s roughly 940,000 for a fair per-capita read. In that area, police recorded 18,704 reported bike thefts in 2025, itself a decline from more than 20,000 in 2024 — a per-capita reported rate of roughly 22 thefts per 1,000 residents, against Amsterdam’s roughly 11.5 per 1,000 based on its 10,810 reports. On paper, Denmark’s cycling capital reports almost twice Amsterdam’s theft rate. Whether that reflects an actual difference in theft, or simply a Danish population more inclined to file a police report — Copenhagen’s clearance rate sits at under 1 percent of cases, so reporting is mostly for insurance purposes, not any real hope of recovery — is impossible to settle from the numbers alone, especially set against Amsterdam’s own estimate that its true theft count runs two to three times higher than what gets reported.
German cities offer a different kind of comparison: not by absolute population match, but by rate. Statista’s analysis of 2019 federal crime statistics found Leipzig had Germany’s highest bike-theft rate at roughly 1,700 per 100,000 residents, with the cycling university town of Münster close behind at around 1,374 per 100,000. Converted to the same 1,000-resident basis used above, that’s roughly 17 and 13.7 respectively — putting both German cities above Amsterdam’s reported rate and in the same range as Copenhagen’s.
None of this is a competition Amsterdam is trying to win. It’s closer to a tax on the thing that makes the city work: when nearly everyone rides, and racks and canal railings are the only security most people bother with, a certain volume of loss becomes close to structural. What distinguishes Amsterdam isn’t that the problem is unusually severe by the standards of serious cycling cities — Copenhagen’s numbers suggest it may not be — but that Amsterdam has built an unusually visible, almost theatrical set of institutions for cleaning up after it: a barge with a claw, a depot the size of a small industrial estate, and, as of 2023, a peer-reviewed paper following the bikes themselves.
Sources
- Where do stolen bikes go? — MIT News
- Where Do Stolen Bikes Go? — MIT DUSP
- Tracking stolen bikes in Amsterdam — Venverloo et al., PLOS ONE / senseable.mit.edu
- Aantal aangiften van fietsendiefstal stijgt voor derde jaar op rij — NOS
- Aantal fietsendiefstallen blijft maar stijgen, Amsterdam opnieuw koploper — NH Nieuws
- Fietsdiefstalbestrijding — Bestuurlijk rapport, Rekenkamer Amsterdam
- Most bicycles recovered from waterways (city) — Guinness World Records
- Tens of thousands of incorrectly parked bicycles in Amsterdam’s Fietsdepot — AMSTERDAM Bike City
- Amsterdam’s cycle storage is too full of abandoned bikes — DutchNews.nl
- Copenhagen reported fewer stolen bikes in 2025 — NordiskBil
- Copenhagen (Folketing constituency) — Wikipedia
- Fahrraddiebstähle je 100.000 Einwohner in deutschen Städten — Statista
