Bike parks around the main railway stations cannot cope and councils removed 126,958 wrongly parked bikes in 2013, the Volkskrant reports on Thursday.

In Rotterdam, 11,462 bikes were removed, in Utrecht 25,063 and in The Hague 16,688. Amsterdam, which began the policy of removing wrongly parked bikes, took away 73,745 bikes, double the number of four years ago.

The Netherlands has 22.3 million cyclists and around 40% of them use their bike to get to the station. That is a 30% increase on 2000, the paper says.

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In 2011, transport minister Melanie Schulz-van Haegen wrote to parliament to say that ‘the bike is becoming an increasingly important transport link in getting to the station’.

She calculated that by 2020 an extra 140,000 to 260,000 parking spaces would be needed for bikes.

The main cities are all trying to find space for extra bike parks. Utrecht is currently building what will be the biggest bike park in the world, with room for 12,500 cycles.