Engineers at the IBA, the Amsterdam department of engineering, have come up with a handy way of solving the problem of bicycle storage -- automatic hangers mounted on the city's roofs.

Amsterdam has a problem. There are 300,000 bikes in public spaces in the city at any one time, but only 200,000 official bicycle parking spots, meaning that 100,000 are parked unofficially, and in some cases illegally. A company called Velominck has been building underground bike parking garages in the city since 2005, but its latest plan is to site them on the roofs of buildings instead.

Here's how it'd work. When you arrive at your destination, you find a Velominck station and swipe a transport card a little like one of London's Oyster cards against a terminal so it knows who you are. A door opens, and you clip your bike into a robotic arm, which then pulls it up a transparent elevator to the roof. It can then be safely stored there until the owner returns and swipes the card again -- which summons the bike down from the rooftop.

Matthijs Griffioen, the leader of the project at IBA, said (in Dutch) that the bicycle-parking problem in Amsterdam can't be solved easily. He added that parking in the city needs to be denser, and investment in infrastructure needs to bring value-for-money.

It's a little way off roll-out still. Its makers say that it could take up to five years to complete the first rooftop parking system. In the meantime, the IBA is working on ways to improve the efficiency of existing bike storage facilities.

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