The changing bicycle landscape

Yet another large-scale facility for parking bicycles in a Dutch city: https://www.omroepwest.nl/nieuws/4112690/Verlengde-tunnel-Den-Haag-HS-geopend-perroningang-fietstunnel-gesloten. Everybody seems to want to declutter the streets from the untidiness of bicycles lying around. The picturesque anarchy of so many street photographs is apparently something of the past. 

Admittedly the situation in busy city parts, such as around railway stations, used to be frustrating. Leaving your bicycle there was an adventure, often without a happy ending. The new, covered and controlled facilities seem much better for finding a place for your bicycle, the chances of retrieving it from there, as well as for the health of your bicycle. 

Still, every time I have to be at such a facility, there are things that trouble me. First of all, their huge capacity often seems insufficient. This can be due to the Jevons paradox: the bigger the capacity of the new bicycle parking facilities, the larger the demand for parking places. People are certainly not just invited but obliged to put their bikes there. It can also be so that the previous, anarchic situation had a much bigger capacity than people think. Distributing bicycle parking to every nook and cranny of a neighbourhood does irritate but also creates many opportunities. 

Even worse is the feeling of regimentation I get from the prescription surrounding my actions: everything has to be done in a certain way and at a certain place, without exception or variation. And this is not just a matter of sentiment: concentrating actions and their effects has a practical impact, too. You can see it in the flows of people from and to the parking facilities in railway stations in peak times. Some parts of the environment are then overused, while others remain practically empty. So, I wonder if a distributed solution might be more efficient and cost-effective for bicycle parking.