Follow-up post: Looking around my city, I think we have these bikes too, although they haven’t become near-refuse as pictured in the videos. At least not in the parts of the city I frequent. The program may not have been going on as long here.
The bikes I mentioned earlier are provided by the city government.
Amsterdam has an enormous number of bikes, but not the 9 million that Katie Melua claims (though there might be 9 million bicycles in the Randstad, the megalopolis that Amsterdam is part of), and it has some spectacular bike parking facilities, but it doesn’t have free public bikes, exactly because nobody would return them.
Most famously, in the 1960s there was a proposal for het “Witte Fietsenplan” (Witte fietsenplan — Hart Amsterdammuseum). Rental bikes do exist of course, and there have been plenty of proposals for public bike systems with some sort of deposit, but I don’t know if those every got anywhere. I never see them anywhere.
I must be missing something. Why aren’t the found bikes put back in to service?
BBS has a bilke share?
“Big Mac’s a Big Mac, but you know what they call a Quarter Pounder in Amsterdam?”
This is the crap I carry around in my head.
I can think of two possibilities. One is that the city authorities have come to think of the bikes as litter and would prefer to just keep them locked up in one area rather than pollute the streets again. The other possibility is that the bikes are in service, but the companies managing the bikes have no incentive to distribute them around the city again, and the potential riders don’t bother getting them out of the (possibly remote) corral. After all, according to the article, there are still a lot of bikes out there.
Huh, who knew? (thanks, Merriam-Webster)
Speaking colorfully, what’s pictured here could be called “a bike of bikes” 
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