Amsterdam Makes A New Push To Keep Cars Out
Source: Bloomberg, Sarah Jacob
Photo: A tram passes a parked automobile beside a canal in Amsterdam in 2019. The narrow streets of the canal-intensive central city are easily clogged by vehicle traffic. (Jasper Juinen/Bloomberg)
The Dutch capital is proposing new restrictions on through-traffic as it redoubles efforts to keep cars from flooding the central city.
While Amsterdam’s well-known network of dedicated bicycle lanes have made cycling a swift and popular mode of transport across the Dutch capital, the city is not exactly the car-free paradise outsiders might assume. Among residents, automobiles still accounted for almost 20% of all journeys in Amsterdam in 2021 — and 55% of trips undertaken by visitors, according to the city. In a dense, older city with narrow streets and conflicting demands for access, this causes problems, notably for public transit in the central city, where trams and buses often struggle to make headway as they mix with cars.
In response, city leaders have been working to limit the number of private vehicles in this equation, by removing automobile parking spaces and banning car traffic on certain streets. Now Amsterdam is proposing a wider crackdown on cars criss-crossing its city center by closing sections of several streets to through-traffic — both to help clear street space and ultimately to wean citizens off the habit of treating the city core as a standard route across town.
These interventions would cover multiple locations in the metropolitan area outside the historic core, including arteries around the Vondelpark, in the City West and East Amsterdam areas, as well as four bridges over the Amstel river. The bans on through-traffic are designed to reroute cars to the A10 highway, which would function as a distribution ring, enabling motorists to access each city district separately.
“The city is growing. The space is not,” said Amsterdam’s Deputy Mayor Melanie van der Horst. “With more people, we need to have different ways of living together,” she said in an interview. Amsterdam added over 189,000 residents since 2000, and it forecasts 250,000 new residents in the city by 2050.
Several other nearby EU cities, such as Paris and Brussels, have also launched efforts to combat though-traffic, often as elements of larger campaigns to reduce car use, improve air quality and achieve climate goals.
In Amsterdam, the vehicle restrictions follow up on the city’s new speed restrictions, set to take effect in December 2023, that will cut maximum speed limits across much of the city to 30 kilometers an hour (about 18 miles per hour), from the current 50 kph. Adopted to curb traffic crashes as well as improve transit service, the new rules allow areas that have separate lanes for buses and trams to remain at 50 kph. “Where [buses and trams] drive together with a car, that slows public transport down,” Van der Horst said. “We’ve looked at taking out the car.”
The busy Vondelpark area — where public transport and cars share the same pavement — is likely to serve as the first site for an implementation test. The closure to through-traffic of four locations around the park, in the southwest side of the city, is expected to be the most promising, as public transport experiences many delays in the area. The changes are also expected to yield more space for bicycles and pedestrians, as well as additional green space.
Van der Horst doesn’t expect the street changes to be expensive to implement: Large pots with plantings can serve as bollards to halt vehicles, if the proposal is approved.
“We’ll just literally block it, with flowers,” she said. “It’s pretty Dutch.”