I didn't see the link. Just as I thought, it's a serious problem in the Netherlands as well:
In Amsterdam, drowned bikes were at one time heaped so high in the city’s 165 canals that they scraped the underside of flat-bottomed barges. The solution was fietsen vissen, “bicycle fishing”. In the old days, this task was accomplished by freelance scavengers who plied the canals in rowboats, using hooked poles to extract bikes, which were sold for scrap. In the 1960s, Amsterdam’s water agency assumed responsibility for bicycle fishing. These days, a corps of municipal workers trawl for drowned bikes on boats equipped with cranes attached to hydraulic claw grapples. The problem is not as severe as it once was, but fishers still pull 15,000 bicycles from the canals each year.