NS adding 1,450 rental bicycles to its public transport fleet

NS is in the process of placing 1,450 new public transport bicycles at stations to meet the increasing demand for the bikes, the rail company said on Tuesday. “It is expected that all these hundreds of bicycles will be available to travelers by the end of September.”

The rail company has already placed the first 650 new bikes at stations in Tilburg, Amsterdam, and Leiden, among others. The remaining 800 will be placed in the Amsterdam region at the end of September.

According to NS, the demand for bike rentals has increased every year since it started offering the service in 2008. In the first year, travelers made about 450,000 trips with NS bicycles. In the fifteen years since, that increased to over 5 million per year.

NS currently offers 21,500 bicycles at almost 300 locations in the Netherlands. Approximately 6,800 of them are equipped with the new lock, allowing travelers to open them with their OV chip cards. In addition to adding new bikes to the fleet, NS is also working on installing the new locks on its existing bicycles.