Utrecht Centraal's underground bicycle garage, known as Stationsplein, holds 12,500 bikes and is described by the European Commission as the largest bicycle parking facility in the world. Finding a free spot in a garage that size is not trivial, and an EU-funded project has spent recent years trying to make it easier, first with sensors in the racks and later with camera-based counting.

The project, formally titled "Innovative and digital bike storage solutions in urban nodes for efficient passenger transfer and last-mile connections," runs under the EU's Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) Transport programme, according to the project's official record published by CINEA, the European Commission's climate and infrastructure agency. It covers bicycle parking around the central stations of Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Utrecht. Its published implementation schedule ran from October 2018 to December 2024, with Gemeente Amsterdam as coordinator and Gemeente Utrecht, NS Stations and ProRail as partners. CINEA's record lists a maximum EU contribution of €1,504,813, covering 20 percent of eligible costs.

The technical change is clearer. Sensors in the bike racks were intended to detect occupied spaces and flag bikes left standing for too long. Provincie Utrecht reports that some bicycles were missed when they stood beside a sensor or had a wide tyre that did not fit neatly into the channel. ProRail later moved to cameras paired with counting software, which the province says now count bicycles that the sensors sometimes missed.

"If you offer good facilities in a good parking garage, people will use them," Ramon Egberts, at the time ProRail's technical project leader, told Provincie Utrecht. "We have a very successful bike-and-train combination, but you also see that you constantly have to adapt to change."

That pattern of adaptation is visible elsewhere around the station. ProRail reopened the renovated Sijpesteijnkade bicycle garage, a short walk from Centraal, in October 2025 with 763 spaces, including 34 cargo-bike and 46 crate-bike spots, plus digital displays showing capacity per row and a link to the municipality's own digital wayfinding boards.

The upgrades matter beyond Utrecht. The Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management is separately leading a national programme to add 143,500 bicycle parking spaces at 47 railway stations, an investment of up to €550 million — yet a 2015 evaluation cited in the CINEA project record still projected a shortfall of 98,000 spaces by 2030. Squeezing more reliable use out of existing garages, in other words, is not a side project to building new ones; it's necessary alongside it.

ProRail says bicycle-parking systems must keep adapting as bicycle designs change, mentioning fatbikes, cargo bikes and child seats.