I hate the parking situation around Centraal Station

When the underground parking garages were first announced, I was excited. I didn't realize they would come at the cost of every other parking space around the station. It's now become incredibly inconvenient to park my bicycle when I take a train or bus. There used to nearly always be space in the racks under the bridge, but the racks are gone. You have to go into a garage that is only accessible with an OV-chip card, or a tag that costs 2,50 -- when the garage is open, which is not always. How is this acceptable? Why can't you check in with your bank card? Why is it possible for the garage to be closed? Why isn't everyone protesting this system that's objectively less convenient, more time consuming and more expensive than it was before? If you want the security of a parking garage, fine, I get it. I'd rather park my bike nearer to the station for free. The nearest free parking space, as far as I know, is on Haarlemmerdijk.

Yes, all the bicycles parked outside of the racks around the station were a nuisance. But they could have fixed that by actually enforcing the existing laws on parking, as they're finally doing now that the parking garages exist. Obviously this is because they don't want the garages to bleed money. So you'll see bikes locked to bridge railings, where they don't bother anyone, with stickers on them that they're going to be removed. It seems like people are putting parking tickets on bikes every day around Centraal.

In other parts of the city, the sidewalks have been made practically unwalkable by parked bicycles and no one does anything. Bicycles are even blocking tactile pavement, which many blind people use to navigate. In the rare event that one of these bicycles gets a sticker, it's often another couple of weeks before it finally gets removed. Bicycles that are actually a nuisance or even a hazard are ignored because people are wasting time putting parking tickets on bicycles locked to bridge railings, just so that people will actually use the inconvenient underground parking garages.

Imagine tourists from Copenhagen coming over to see if we are indeed the superior cycling city, renting a couple of bikes and then discovering they are not allowed to park them anywhere near Central Station. It's shameful.