Lazy loads are billed per new parent touched, so count distinct parents, not children.

Within one transaction Hibernate remembers every entity it has loaded. The first time a bike points at an unseen station it runs a lookup; later bikes at that same station reuse the cached one. So the extra queries equal the number of different stations reached, plus the one initial list query. That is why scattered data hurts most.

Read it once, then a question tests whether the trick stuck.