Although it is a pity that the Ministry of Housing, Regional Development and the Environment has decided to remove all requirements concerning storage sheds from the building code as of this year, the building code itself was not ideal at all. This may be concluded from the report by Laurent Theunissen, Fietsen stallen bij wooncomplexen, presented at his 2002 graduation at the Hogeschool voor Verkeerskunde in Diepenbeek (Belgium). A storage shed has to meet a great many more requirements if the owner is to use it for parking his bike and regularly taking it out again for a ride.
Theunissen studied 26 apartment blocks (2781 houses) in Maastricht, ensuring in his selection a wide range of construction years and residential neighbourhoods. He distinguishes three types of apartment blocks: blocks of flats with an entrance hall from the fifties and sixties, galleried flats from the seventies and eighties and recently-built apartment blocks. Regarding the sizes of the storage sheds, Theunissen determines that the old entrance-hall flats have in general much more storage space (on average room for 6,2 bicycles) than the galleried flats (3,6 bicycles) and that modern times - to which the 1992 building code refers - have hardly improved matters (3,8 bicycles). Although all storage sheds, with one exception, do meet the minimum 3,5 m2 required by the building code, parking capacity is felt to be tight in a considerable part of the apartment buildings. This may be because they did not meet the 6,5-percent requirement of the building code, but this has not been examined in more detail by Theunissen.
It is not only the size of the storage sheds that leaves a lot to be desired. Among other things, Theunissen also concludes that walking distances to the sheds are very long and comfort is bad, that the storage areas generate feelings of unease and danger, that the route to the entrance often consists of a badly lit, semi-public rear entrance and that there is a relatively high risk of bicycle theft.
In order to promote bicycle possession and use, Theunissen makes a number of recommendations on the design of storage sheds. This does assume, of course, that storage sheds are being built at all....