There's a dark side to Europe's huge bike culture

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Europe's affinity for two-wheeled transportation is enviable to anyone who enjoys riding bikes.

But you don't often hear about the thousands of stolen and discarded bicycles getting dredged from local waterways in Copenhagen and Amsterdam, the two cities with the largest bike cultures in Europe, each year.

It's hard to overstates how much these cities love bikes. In the aftermath of a snowstorm in Copenhagen, bike lanes are cleared before the roadways. In Amsterdam, so-called "green waves" allow bikes to cruise without red lights if they maintain a certain speed. And in both cities, bikes outnumber people.

So it's a bit jarring, if not alarming, to see these supposedly beloved vehicles getting fished out of a canal and heaped onto a pile.

Bikes from the deep

A photo posted by Simon Herzog (@simonherzog) on Mar 15, 2016 at 8:39am PDTMar 15, 2016 at 8:39am PDT

That photo, taken on March 15 by Simon Herzog, shows bicycles getting rescued from Denmark's Frederiksholm's Canal, in Copenhagen.

According to Herzog, who's lived in Copenhagen for two years, bikes are often fished out of the canal and a handful of lakes strewn around the city.

A massive barge floats down the canal as a mechanical arm sweeps the canal floor. According to Herzog, sometimes the problem in the canals isn't just an underwater one.

"They're also shallow enough that you can usually see at least a couple of bikes from the edge," he says.

The problem might be even worse in Amsterdam, where the organization overseeing the city's 165 canals, Waternet, keeps an official count of how many bikes it fishes out each year.

Lately, the total is between 12,000-15,000 bicycles annually.

Since bicycles owners probably aren't the ones tossing their trusty steeds into the water, Waternet suspects the responsible parties are either vandals who just want to be destructive or thieves who don't know what else to do with the stolen property.

The bikes that Waternet scoops up all end up as scrap metal, even if they appear to be in good condition.

RIP.