Mobility in Amsterdam
Walking, cycling, driving and taking public transport in Amsterdam is like no other city.
Lydia and I visited Amsterdam for the first time in September 2023. It may seem odd for a web site devoted to sports cars and motoring to cover a city where driving is explicitly discouraged, but I think the results of these efforts have yielded interesting and surprising results for drivers which could serve as a model for other congested cities. Also adding to the unusual nature of this article is that we did not drive at all during our stay, and only rode in a car twice, both taxis we hailed to get us out of tricky directional predicaments.
When we arrived, our nephew and his partner welcomed us at the airport and we took a commuter train to a station where we crossed from one side of the platform to the other to take a subway train. Payment for both transit systems was as simple as tapping our credit card. Having just stepped off the airplane, we already felt part of the city’s transportation network.
The subway traveled above ground for a while but when we reached the older part of town, we descended underground. While everyone knows that Amsterdam’s grade is one meter below sea level, I was unnerved being even lower below sea level in a watertight tunnel. Thankfully, I saw no leaks. We got off at our stop and walked a few city blocks to our hotel.
The next morning Lydia and I decided to walk to the Rijksmuseum and our first excursion around town quickly illustrated, especially when crossing the street, the hierarchy of transportation modes in Amsterdam. The remaining two weeks of our trip confirmed our first impressions. The four-tier hierarchy we experienced can be categorized as follows:
Tier 1: Bicycles
Tier 2: Public Transit
Tier 3: Pedestrians
Tier 4: Cars and Trucks
Tier 1: Bicycles
Bicycles: The top of the transportation food chain, cyclists, rule the city’s mobility network. On any road, bicycles have priority and on major streets and boulevards, are assigned their own designated lanes with designated traffic signals, which are strictly observed by the cyclists. Other than observing traffic signals, I witnessed little decorum exhibited by the throng of peddlers. Bicycles come at you from all directions. Everyone seems to cycle, including men and women in formal attire, business suits, work clothes, yoga outfits, uniforms. What you don’t see are spandex wearing Tour de France want-to-be’s perched on tortuous saddles, riding their Italian carbon-fibre, 20-gear projectiles. What you do see parked everywhere is an endless supply of battered, heavy black-framed bikes with single gears and peddle-backwards brakes. Also common are strange looking cargo bikes with a small front wheel, an enormous basket-like area located ahead of the rider that carry merchandise, multiple children or the tools used in your work.
As a pedestrian if you wander onto the bicycle lane, you risk death or injury. If the experience leaves you physically unscathed, the verbal abuse you receive in Dutch by the riders who avoided you is equally traumatizing, whether you understand the language or not. After a few days you get used to the constant flow of cyclists and you think you have mastered the system by gauging the speed of approaching cyclists. You are wrong.
E-bikes are increasing in popularity and some of them are very fast. You see one in the distance and think you have enough time to cross the bike lanes based on the pace kept by cyclists. The much faster e-bike bears down on you midway along the bike lanes you are crossing. We kept encountering one particular model that was deceptively fast. It is quite low, fitted with fat tires, painted matt-black and sport a large old-style motorcycle headlight. We called it The Cyclops. It looked a lot like the Emma 3.0 Fat Tire shown below.
Public Transit: We have already discussed the subway and commuter rail systems and they prove unobtrusive, especially if you are navigating the city’s core. Above ground, however, lurks an extensive tram network. When a pedestrian crosses a typical busy street, this is what they encounter. One steps off the sidewalk onto the cycling lane moving in the direction of traffic, except when a cyclist decides to travel the other way. Next is the single car lane also moving in the direction of traffic. Thankfully, we did not see anyone driving in the wrong direction. In the middle of the road are the two tram tracks. At the designated stops you will find platforms and shelters for passengers on either side of the rails. Then on the other side of the tracks are the lanes for cars and the bicycle lane moving in the opposite direction. You have to deal with all these lanes when crossing the street at a traffic signal. J-walking is exponentially more treacherous.
When using the tram your biggest challenge is getting across the bike lane to the platform. Cars are usually moving slowly and will stop if you stray in their lane. Bicycles will not. Once on the platform, computer screens show you the number of the next tram and how many minutes before it arrives. Typically, you tap your credit card when you step on the tram and you tap it again when you disembark. The trams also display information about their destinations.
Similar to bicyclists, the trams have priority over cars and pedestrians. As a pedestrian I can assure you if you are on the track and a tram is bearing down on you, get out of the way. Unlike many cities were the trams share the road with other motorized vehicles, here the rail lanes are reserved for them and anything on the track is fair game.
Pedestrians: As you can see, pedestrians stroll among the bicycles and trams at their own peril. Thankfully, the sidewalk is your domain and it is reserved for pedestrians… to a certain point, provided you are prepared to navigate through thousands of parked bikes. Sidewalk obstacles aside, walking in Amsterdam is a great way to get around once you understand the city’s layout. A coastal city, Amsterdam’s epicenter faces the port leading to the North Sea. Like Venice, it is famous for its canals. Think of the city layout as a series of semi-circular canals radiating inland. There are intersecting canals connecting the network but much of the road system follows the same curvature as those semi-circular canals. Therefore, as my nephew Brendan pointed out, there isn’t much point telling someone to go east or west along a road when it’s curvature will eventually take you north. Maps are a necessity in this city.
Cars and Trucks: It should be clear to the reader by now that the car is relegated to the lowest tier. Amsterdam residents are expected to cycle, take public transport or walk. And they do so in great numbers. The city’s infrastructure is designed to encourage the use of bicycles. Municipal initiatives include parking structures dedicated to storing them. We visited a new underground facility by the main train station that can hold as many as 7000 bicycles. There is not a space in there for a single car. Parking for cars is hard to find and expensive when you finally find a spot. Taking a cab is also a costly endeavor.
You do see car traffic but it is surprisingly light. Given the city’s culture of using tier-one to tier-three mobility methods, what you notice are fewer cars than you would expect in a major urban center. Small cars are preferred, not that you don’t see large ones, but the impression I get is that people driving larger vehicles in the city are on their way out of town. We spotted a number of exotics as well, such as Porsches, Ferraris and Aston Martins, all on the move but I think they were also on their way to a road trip.
We noticed many electric vehicles, many more than we see in North America. The city even has many electric charging stations on the street, something we do not see at home. Netherlands is a small country and going from city to city is a short drive, unlike Canada where range anxiety is always top of mind when you leave an urban center. EVs just seem more workable in the Dutch environment.
You would expect driving in Amsterdam to be unpleasant given the car’s low status. Watching drivers and riding in a few taxis, we found driving to be surprisingly relaxing. The low volume of traffic calms things down considerably. In addition, drivers drive slowly. I don’t think we ever saw any one exceed 40 kph. In the city center drivers have to pay attention to cyclists, pedestrians and the tramway, making rushing a recipe for disaster. Paradoxically, we found that with everyone driving slowly, we seemed to get to our destination a lot faster.
Why is Amsterdam important to automotive culture?
Amsterdam, you would think would be anti-car. A friend and colleague of mine grew up in Amsterdam in the 1970s and told me the traffic at that time was horrific. He spoke of traffic jams twenty kilometers long caused by commuters trying to get to the office on workweek mornings. What government authorities did was work on public transit for commuters, reinforce and expand the infrastructure to facilitate mobility for the already many cyclists within the inner city. They did not shun the car, they made it preferable for people to use other modes of transport into and around town. Use your car to travel from city to city, not to get your groceries.
As a visitor, I can confirm it seems to work. There is a strong Dutch car culture, as evidenced by their love of motorsport, especially Formula One racing. Defending world champion, Max Verstappen is half Dutch and has been embraced as a hero by the whole country. Simultaneously, the people of Amsterdam are getting around using other means of
transportation. Behind this paradox, the city has not vilified the automobile or banned it, they just made it inconvenient to use cars in major cities while, and this is the important part, investing heavily in alternate modes of mobility. There is a lesson there for municipalities that talk about reducing traffic congestion while not being serious about providing usable alternatives to its citizens.