Bicycles were once piled so deep in Amsterdam's canals that they scraped the bottoms of the barges going over them. A crew has been pulling them out since the 1960s with a hydraulic claw mounted on a boat, and it still lifts about 12,000 a year into a scrap barge.

Bicycles were once piled so deep in Amsterdam's canals that they scraped the bottoms of the barges going over them. A crew has been pulling them out since the 1960s with a hydraulic claw mounted on a boat, and it still lifts about 12,000 a year into a scrap barge.

Every year, Amsterdam's canal-cleaning crew hauls out enough bicycles to fill a small parking lot—a mundane operation so routine it's easy to forget it's actually extraordinary.