Full Transcript

·YouTLDR

Amsterdam Just Keeps Getting Awesome

32:19EnglishTranscribed Jul 22, 2026
0:00

I hate to be the one to tell ya but,  there are too many cars in your city. 

0:04

It doesn’t matter where you live, there  is space near you that could be used for 

0:08

Pedestrian areas, Public transit, 

0:11

Bicycle lanes, Parks, 

0:13

Or new housing projects. But instead, it’s being  

0:16

used to move or store cars. Which is why every city everywhere 

0:21

needs a document like this. This  is Agenda Amsterdam Autoluw,  

0:26

a 90 page document describing how and why  Amsterdam will remove cars. With a goal of  

0:31

becoming a more accessible and liveable city. This document was published in October 2019, 

0:38

the same month I published my first  video essay on Not Just Bikes. 

0:43

I read this document as soon as it was released  and in many ways it helped set the tone and  

0:48

direction for this YouTube channel. Here was a document that clearly  

0:52

illustrated all of the good urban planning  fundamentals I had been learning about, 

0:56

And all of the challenges  of building a liveable city, 

1:00

With blunt declarations of what they  were actually going to do about it. 

1:04

I referenced this document at  the end of my fourth video. 

1:07

[there are a lot of] [very interesting elements] 

1:09

[of this plan but] [I’ll talk about that] 

1:10

[in more detail in] [a future video] 

1:12

So yeah, I do what I say I’m going to do …  even if it takes me seven years to do it. 

1:17

Of course, the real reason why I waited  this long was because plans are cheap,  

1:21

and I wanted to see if any  of this actually happened. 

1:24

In my videos I generally avoid talking about  the plans that a city has for the future. 

1:29

I may briefly mention a plan at the  end to acknowledge its existence, but 

1:33

the overwhelming emphasis in all of my videos is  what the experience is like today, not what it  

1:40

might maybe become some time in the future. And the reason for this is simple. 

1:46

I was involved in advocacy for many, many years  before starting this YouTube channel, and I’ve  

1:50

been burned way too many times in the past. I used to refer to Toronto as “OnlyPlans”  

1:56

because they were always publishing grandiose  plans for urbanisation and public transit,  

2:01

but almost none of it actually got built. So, now that this Amsterdam document has  

2:07

been published for a while. Did the city actually  follow through on any of these amazing proposals? 

2:12

Well yeah, they actually built  a lot of what said they would. 

2:17

So let’s talk about Amsterdam Autoluw, why it's needed, 

2:21

what actually got built, And what other cities might learn from this plan  

2:25

to make Amsterdam a better place to live. [NJB Intro] 

2:34

OK, so before we get started.  What does “autoluw” even mean? 

2:38

Well “auto” obviously means car, and  as for “luw”, it literally means, 

2:43

“sheltered from the wind.” 

2:46

This is a Dutch urban planning term that  doesn’t really have a good English translation. 

2:50

Now, before you start typing. Every time I mention  this I get literally hundreds of comments from  

2:56

Dutch people with incredibly awkward translations  for autoluw. Trust me, all of these are terrible. 

3:04

English does have the term lee, as in leeward,  which means the same thing as the Dutch luw,  

3:10

but trust me, no native English speaker  wants to talk about Carly streets. 

3:15

Some English speakers  translate autoluw as “low-car” 

3:18

or “car-lite”, which are closer,  

3:21

but I don’t think they quite get the point across. And translation apps are useless because  

3:26

they usually just translate it to  “car-free”. Which is definitely wrong. 

3:31

So I personally use the translation proposed  by David Hembrow in this 2013 blog post.  

3:37

Autoluw translates to “nearly car-free”. This is slightly awkward, but it immediately  

3:43

gets the point across to native English speakers. Places that are autoluw are not completely free  

3:48

of cars, but there are so few cars that,  in practice, they are nearly car-free. 

3:55

Amsterdam is trying to make  its existing streets autoluw,  

3:58

but if you want to see what it looks like when  a town is designed to be autoluw from the start, 

4:03

I made a video about the town of Houten, and I’ll  leave a link to that video in the description. 

4:09

But you might be asking, if this plan  is ultimately about making Amsterdam  

4:12

more liveable and accessible, why  is it so focused on removing cars? 

4:17

Well, the title of the document provides a hint  here, “Amsterdam makes room”, or “makes space”  

4:22

is maybe a better translation. And this makes sense because  

4:26

it doesn’t matter if those cars are driving, parked, autonomous, or flying,  

4:32

at the end of the day, cars take up significantly  more space than any other form of transportation. 

4:39

Urban planners refer to this as the “geometry  problem” because it’s so fundamental. 

4:43

And the document has a graphic showing how much  space cars take up compared to other modes,  

4:48

when they're moving and parked. 

4:52

Since cities are inherently space-limited,  they need to do everything they can to conserve  

4:56

the space that they have, which necessarily  involves removing as many cars as possible. 

5:03

Of course, while space is the primary concern,  there are many other problems caused by  

5:07

cars that are outlined in this document  including safety, pollution, and noise, 

5:12

and I’ve talked about those problems  and many others in a previous video. 

5:17

I remember when I first got involved  in urbanist advocacy in Canada,  

5:20

I didn’t want to focus on the cars. Cars were inevitable, I thought, so it seemed  

5:25

like a waste of time to talk about them. Instead I wanted to improve the city  

5:29

around the cars, or maybe, in spite of them. But with cars taking up all the space, it became  

5:36

very clear that it was impossible to make any  serious improvements without affecting the cars. 

5:42

What’s worse is that, as I travelled  to more great cities around the world, 

5:45

I started to notice that the best urban  places were always those with the fewest cars. 

5:52

And this was the case in literally every  city in every country I ever visited, 

5:57

which is why I started to refer to it as  

5:59

the “Universal Law of Cities."  It seems trite, but it’s true.  

6:03

Cars ruin cities. So you cannot have a truly  great city if it is easily accessible to cars. 

6:10

In fact, I would go further to say that,  any growing city that doesn’t have a plan  

6:14

to make it less friendly to cars will not be  a liveable city within the next few decades. 

6:20

Of course, if you live somewhere car-centric,  this is a difficult concept to understand,  

6:25

and it has actually been a legitimate problem that  I’ve had with this YouTube and Nebula channel. 

6:30

The vast majority of my  audience is from Europe or Asia, 

6:33

and I strongly believe that the “next step”  that needs to be taken in European and Asian  

6:38

cities is to remove cars as much as possible. Which is why in previous videos I have highlighted  

6:45

some of the places around the world that are  removing cars to build better urban places. 

6:50

And this is a perfectly  reasonable thing to propose. 

6:53

For example, even in car-friendly Germany,  most towns and cities have some streets that  

6:58

are nearly or completely car-free. But cities in the US and Canada are  

7:03

so far behind in urban planning, and have destroyed so much of their  

7:07

downtowns for automobile infrastructure, that banning cars seems like an extremist  

7:12

position, and some American advocates  get upset that I even suggest it. 

7:17

Which is why I often direct Americans to Strong  Towns because they propose solutions that,  

7:22

while they won’t exactly build  the world's greatest cities, 

7:24

they are at least a big step in the  right direction, and most importantly, 

7:28

they are much more likely to  actually get implemented in the US. 

7:33

In Amsterdam, this autoluwe plan is  ambitious, but it’s not particularly radical. 

7:38

It’s really just the logical continuation of what  the people of Amsterdam have wanted for decades. 

7:45

For example, the majority of Amsterdam residents  voted to make the city centre autoluw in 1992. 

7:51

Which is why it looks like this today. 

7:54

instead of like this, the way  it looked in the 70s, and 80s. 

7:59

These images may be shocking, but the  document addresses this directly. Just as  

8:03

it seems absolutely crazy to us that Amsterdam  used to allow so many cars in the city centre,  

8:09

it is very likely that, after  these new plans are implemented, 

8:13

it will seem equally crazy to  future residents that we allowed so  

8:17

many cars in the rest of the city today. Whenever there is a plan to remove cars,  

8:23

there are always people who are up in arms  about it, but after the cars are removed, 

8:28

you will struggle to find anybody  who wants to bring them back. 

8:33

Thankfully, residents of Amsterdam have seen  these positive changes over the past few decades,  

8:37

and there is very strong support for these plans. The city has run many public consultations  

8:42

and the majority of residents have been very  clear that they want fewer cars in the city. 

8:48

Car ownership in Amsterdam  has been declining for years,  

8:51

and there are now only 0.4 cars per household,  the lowest of any city in the Netherlands. 

8:56

And on top of that, surveys have shown that about  

8:58

30% of households that do own a  car use it once per week or less. 

9:05

In 2017, the number of Amsterdam residents  who travelled primarily by bicycle was 35%,  

9:11

compared to 19% by car. And that was  already 8% lower than a decade before.  

9:17

Given that these stats are nine years old now,  I expect those numbers to be even smaller today. 

9:23

So the use of cars has been drastically dropping,  yet there is still a massive amount of public  

9:27

space taken up by automobiles,  because of the geometry problem. 

9:32

Meanwhile Amsterdam is growing quickly, and they  expect to have over one million residents by 2032.  

9:38

The number of people commuting into the  city each day is increasing, and there are  

9:42

more tourists visiting each year, too. The hard fact is that Amsterdam will  

9:47

not be a liveable city if most of  these new people get around by car. 

9:52

There are a lot of topics covered in this  document, including how Amsterdam will manage  

9:56

all of the needs of the city, while also using as few motor  

9:59

vehicles as possible. But for this video,  

10:02

I want to focus primarily on street design and  the projects that have actually been completed. 

10:07

As well as some of the things that were  built in the space freed up by removing cars. 

10:12

For some of these reconstruction projects  I had heard about them in advance, 

10:15

But there were other times where I was  traveling somewhere else in the city, 

10:18

and just stumbled across some great new  improvements that I didn’t know about. 

10:23

This has resulted in something  that I never would have expected:  

10:26

I actually look forward to construction projects. I remember, when living in Toronto, that I dreaded  

10:32

it any time a street was being torn  up, because I knew that it was going  

10:35

to be years of difficult travel through  that area, and when they were finished 

10:40

there would be giant asphalt  blobs making the sidewalks uneven, 

10:44

or they would just forget to re-paint the bike  lanes for six months, it was always something.  

10:49

The city made it very clear that if you weren’t  travelling by car, then you were not a priority,  

10:54

and construction often made things  worse for anybody who didn’t drive. 

10:59

Meanwhile, there have been dozens  of street reconstruction projects  

11:02

since I moved to Amsterdam 8 years ago. And yeah, they’re inconvenient sometimes. 

11:06

Though I’m consistently impressed at how  well detours are marked for cyclists. 

11:10

And it’s amazing to see that, even during major  reconstruction, keeping the trams running is  

11:15

always a top priority. But more importantly,  

11:18

every single time a street in Amsterdam is  re-designed, the end result is always better. 

11:24

A good example of this is the  redesign of Kinkerstraat in 2022. 

11:28

This part of the street was made one-way  for cars in the 1990s, but it was still  

11:32

a busy street with lots of parking. In the redesign the one-way configuration  

11:36

for cars was maintained, but all  of the parking spaces were removed. 

11:40

As you can imagine, this freed up a lot of space. Which was used to widen the sidewalks, 

11:45

Install new bicycle parking, And plant a lot more trees. 

11:49

The tram platforms were improved as well. There are many tram stops in Amsterdam that  

11:54

have very narrow platforms. Which can  get crowded and make them difficult to  

11:57

use for people in wheelchairs. But when parking is removed,  

12:01

there’s lots of spaces for wider platforms, which  makes these tram stops much more accessible. 

12:07

The tram platform is in the middle of the  street and the bicycle lane curves around it. 

12:11

And speed humps were installed in the bike  lanes to slow down any bicycles or mopeds  

12:16

before they reach the pedestrian crossing,  making it safer to get to the tram stop. 

12:21

There are no more parking spaces on this street,  but there are temporary loading zones for shops. 

12:27

And instead of being at street  level, they are at sidewalk level,  

12:30

which is becoming common in Amsterdam. This means that when there is not  

12:34

a vehicle unloading here, then the  sidewalk effectively becomes bigger. 

12:40

The redesign of Kinkerstraat also  shows a surprising design choice  

12:43

that is becoming more common in Amsterdam:  the protected bicycle lanes were removed. 

12:49

This might seem like a giant step backwards,  but it makes sense in this context. 

12:54

Protected bicycle lanes are great, and they’re  necessary on roads with a lot of car traffic. 

12:59

But cycling has become so popular in Amsterdam  that many bicycle lanes have become overcrowded,  

13:04

which was definitely the case on Kinkerstraat. So in the redesign, car drivers share the lane  

13:09

with trams, which means that there  is much more space for cyclists. 

13:13

And what was previously the bicycle lane was used  for all of the other things needed on the street,  

13:17

like the bicycle parking and trees I mentioned. Which in turn freed up space for wider sidewalks. 

13:24

Of course, removing the protected  bicycle lanes on this street was  

13:27

only possible because there are so few cars. And that was only possible because the city  

13:32

has been de-prioritising car travel for  so many years, plus with parking removed,  

13:37

there are even fewer reasons to drive on  this street, reducing car volumes even more.  

13:42

And I think that this is an underappreciated  benefit of autlouwe streets. 

13:47

Dedicated public transit lanes take up  a lot of space, but they’re necessary so  

13:51

that trams and buses don’t get stuck behind cars. But without the cars, they’re not needed anymore. 

13:58

Protected bicycle lanes take up  space, but they’re necessary to  

14:01

keep people cycling from being killed by cars. But without the cars, they're not needed anymore.  

14:08

But this kind of design only works  if you remove the cars first. 

14:13

This is what Kinkerstraat looked like in  the 70s and 80s. This was also a shared  

14:17

space for all modes of travel, but it was  a complete mess. Cycling was dangerous,  

14:22

public transit was slow and inefficient,  and the street was loud, polluted, and ugly. 

14:27

All that was really needed to get to  this, was to remove most of the cars. 

14:33

As for car parking, there was already this  parking garage under De Hallen nearby that was  

14:37

almost always empty, so anybody who really wants  to drive to Kinkerstraat can park there instead. 

14:43

Removing street parking is a common  theme throughout this document. 

14:47

It has a statistic that in 2019, 11% of all public  space in Amsterdam was taken up by parked cars. 

14:55

What’s worse is that several studies  have shown that in a typical city,  

14:59

about a third of all car traffic is just drivers  cruising around looking for street parking. 

15:04

And in some cities it’s  significantly higher than that. 

15:08

The existence of parking generates more  car traffic as well, which makes sense,  

15:13

because people are much more likely to drive  to a place if they think they can park there. 

15:18

In most Japanese cities, there is  almost no street parking at all, 

15:22

which is one of the reasons why  Japanese streets are functional,  

15:25

efficient, and have very few cars on them. And I’ve talked about that in a previous video. 

15:31

The goal of every city should be to  remove almost all on-street parking,  

15:35

which is why one of the stated  goals of the Amsterdam government  

15:38

was to remove 10 thousand on-street  parking spaces by the end of 2025. 

15:44

I have a previous video that talks  about why and how that was happening,  

15:48

and I’ll put a link to it in the description, But that video was published in 2022, so the  

15:52

question remains, did the city actually remove  10 thousand parking spaces like they promised to? 

15:59

Yes they did. Whenever there  was construction on any street,  

16:02

the redesign included little or no parking. Apart from a handful of temporary loading zones, 

16:08

And the occasional disabled parking spot. There are many canal walls in  

16:12

Amsterdam which are in need of repair. The city has plans to renew them all, but  

16:17

one way to slow the damage and to buy more time  is to keep heavy things like cars off of them. 

16:23

so removing car parking here  was a very easy decision. 

16:28

A similar thing is happening with bridges,  where any that are in poor condition are  

16:31

blocked off to cars to significantly extend  their lifespans before a renovation is needed. 

16:38

One of the redesigns I really liked was here  in the city centre, on Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal. 

16:44

Once parking was removed there was lots of space  to work with, so the city built this urban park,  

16:49

which brought some much-needed greenery here. And I love the way they made the tram go through  

16:54

the parklette on grassy tram tracks. Removing car parking has made this  

16:59

area feel so much more spacious and  it's safer for cycling now, too. 

17:04

The removal of street parking spaces in  Amsterdam has been very, very noticeable, 

17:08

and it's now the norm that every  time there’s construction there  

17:11

are little or no parking spaces afterwards. It’s amazing to see how much bigger a narrow  

17:17

street feels whenever the car parking is removed. And how many great things can be built in the  

17:22

places formerly reserved for  storing giant metal boxes. 

17:26

So I was very happy to see that the new government  published their coalition agreement last month,  

17:30

and in it they plan to remove another  10 thousand parking spaces by 2030. 

17:37

Amsterdam also increased  the cost of visitor parking,  

17:40

especially in neighbourhoods near the city centre. 

17:43

Visitor parking within the ring road now  costs between about €4 and €8 per hour. 

17:49

The price of visitor parking in Amsterdam is  specifically designed to make it less attractive  

17:53

to drive into the busiest areas of the city. Statistics showed that in 2017, 46% of visitors  

17:59

to Amsterdam arrived by car, which  was 10% less than a decade earlier.  

18:04

Meanwhile 40% of visitors travelled by public  transit, up from 36% in the same time period. 

18:11

In an effort to accelerate that trend, Amsterdam  is expanding Park-and-Ride. Amsterdam now has 9  

18:16

Park-and-Ride garages surrounding the city,  where drivers from out-of-town can park  

18:20

at a discounted rate if they continue their  journey to the city centre by public transit. 

18:26

Or they can park at one of the  many train stations in the region  

18:29

and continue on into Amsterdam by train. Park-and-Ride used to be one flat price,  

18:34

but that has changed recently to better  reflect demand, because some garages were  

18:37

always full and others were nearly empty. But they're designed in such a way that  

18:42

it will be not only cheaper to  park in a Park-and-Ride garage, 

18:46

it will also be faster to take public transit,  rather than trying to drive in the city. 

18:51

I think one of the biggest cultural  changes that needs to happen in the  

18:55

21st-century is that people should not expect  to be able to drive into the centre of cities. 

19:01

Apart from very, very exceptional cases where they  genuinely need a car for that particular trip. 

19:08

Whenever a driver complains about it being  too difficult to drive into the city,  

19:11

the first response should always be, why are you  trying to drive into the city in the first place?  

19:16

It should be considered a stupid thing to do. One place that really shouldn’t have a lot of  

19:22

car traffic is the train station, so I’m really  happy that they significantly improved this area  

19:26

directly in front of Amsterdam Centraal. The street in front of the station used  

19:31

to have a large road, a bus station, and  some of the worst air quality in the city. 

19:36

But the new design prioritises public transit and  blocks cars from going through, and now there’s  

19:42

so much less car traffic in this area. And now that the road is narrower,  

19:46

it freed up space for this two-way  bicycle path which is really nice. 

19:51

Anybody driving through here can  take the road under the station, 

19:55

instead of driving right across the front  of it, where hundreds of train travellers  

19:59

and tourists are always trying to cross. There used to be so much asphalt here,  

20:04

but they removed most of it and  actually made the water larger. 

20:08

And put this amazing bicycle  parking garage under there it too, 

20:11

which I talked about in a previous video. 

20:15

A short distance to the East is this intersection  where the bike path becomes comically large,  

20:21

but this is genuinely a great improvement, because there's a new ferry dock here,  

20:25

and whenever a ferry arrives, a whole  lot of people arrive on bicycles at once. 

20:30

So this intersection has been rebuilt so that  lots of people can safely cycle through here. 

20:36

These wider bicycle paths are  being built all over the city,  

20:39

like at this intersection, that was improved as part of the renovation of Berlagebrug  

20:44

that I talked about in an earlier video. Upgrades for cycling are another major theme in  

20:49

this document, and one of the projects it mentions  is building a continuous “bicycle ring” around the  

20:55

city centre, as the preferred route for cyclists. This part of ring was already under construction  

21:01

when the document was written, and  it’s a much nicer place to cycle now, 

21:05

than one street to the South, which  is the primary route for cars. 

21:09

But this cycling ring was incomplete in  the West, so the newest improvement is  

21:13

this part of Marnixstraat, which in 2025  had an upgrade similar to Kinkerstraat. 

21:19

The street was made one-way for cars  along this stretch and 61 on-street  

21:23

parking spaces were removed in the process. I like how they blocked off the southbound  

21:28

lane by installing this little grassy  area that the trams can ride over. 

21:31

But motor vehicles can’t go  through, and need to turn right. 

21:35

There is now so much less car traffic  here which makes it much a better  

21:39

route for cycling than before. The Amsterdam Autoluw document  

21:44

also talks about building a second  bicycle ring slightly farther out,  

21:48

but they acknowledge that before that can happen, the amount of car traffic along this route would  

21:52

need to be significantly reduced, and there  are a few ways suggested on how to do that. 

21:58

These streets could become alternating one-way  streets, like Kinkerstraat or Marnixstraat,  

22:02

but another solution is to completely block  part of the street to eliminate through traffic. 

22:07

Through traffic is car traffic that is  not going to or from a neighbourhood,  

22:11

but is just passing through. This is the absolute worst kind  

22:15

of automobile traffic, because it brings all  of the negative effects of cars with literally  

22:20

zero benefit to the neighbourhoods  that those cars are passing through. 

22:25

Amsterdam has blocked through traffic on several  streets using what they call a “knip”, that is,  

22:30

putting some kind of barrier in place  to block car traffic completely. 

22:34

In English the urban planning  term for this is a “modal filter” 

22:38

because it filters out certain modes of  transportation, usually motor vehicles,  

22:42

while letting other modes of travel  through, such as people who are walking,  

22:45

cycling, or taking public transit. Many cities do this of course,  

22:49

and it’s not exactly a new concept. These stones were installed in  

22:53

Pompeii two thousand years ago to keep  cart traffic out of the main square. 

22:58

The big difference in Amsterdam is how  often streets are cut off like this,  

23:02

and how modal filters are not just  reserved for smaller neighbourhood streets,  

23:06

like they are in most other cities. The Amsterdam Autoluw document specifically  

23:12

mentions this street, Van Woustraat, as  a street that would benefit from a knip. 

23:16

I always hated coming to this street, and 5  years ago I filmed this footage for a video  

23:22

I called “The Most Dangerous Places to  Cycle in Amsterdam.” It was pretty bad. 

23:27

But this is what that exact same place looks  like now, after the street was redesigned 

23:32

and a modal filter was installed  at the North end of the street. 

23:36

Motor vehicles can still access this street  from the South, so local residents can drive  

23:40

here and the shops can get deliveries. But this place went from being a  

23:44

car-infested mess that I actively avoided, To a safe, quiet, and inviting street,  

23:50

And it was almost entirely because  most car parking was removed, 

23:54

And a knip was installed at the end of the street. When I see a street like this that has improved  

24:00

so much, and yet the only thing that caused that  improvement was removing cars, I hope that you  

24:06

can start to appreciate why so many of my  videos focus on the problems of cars in cities. 

24:11

Because urban places always improve –  significantly – whenever cars are removed. 

24:18

Which is why Amsterdam has installed and  plans to install many more modal filters  

24:22

across the city as a way of controlling car  traffic. But in the Amsterdam Autoluw plan,  

24:28

the city wanted to push the boundaries, to  see how far they could take this approach, 

24:32

so they included a pilot project to see what  would happen if they cut this road, here. 

24:38

This is Weesperstraat, and it’s one  of the busiest roads in the city.  

24:43

This street has a complicated history that involved destroying a lot of people’s houses. 

24:49

Now it carries about 27 thousand vehicles per day,  

24:52

and funnels far too much traffic  into the centre of Amsterdam 

24:56

I have a previous video about the Weesperstraat  knip that I'll link to in the description,  

25:00

but this was only a six-week pilot  project. So what were the results? 

25:06

Well, for one, there were a  lot fewer cars in the city. 

25:10

License plate data showed that traffic volumes  decreased by 18% in and around the pilot area,  

25:16

and the number of cars in the  city centre dropped by 8%. 

25:20

You might think that when a knip is installed,  it would just mean that every other street  

25:24

would get busier, but that is not always the case. When driving becomes more difficult or expensive,  

25:29

what actually happens is that some  people get around in other ways. 

25:33

This is known as “traffic  evaporation”, and you can think  

25:36

of it as the opposite of “induced demand.” Of course, fewer cars along Weesperstraat  

25:41

resulted in less noise and pollution. Nitrogen dioxide emissions decreased by  

25:45

14 percent and noise decreased by 5 decibels. The people living directly along Weesperstraat  

25:52

really liked the knip, with 75 percent  of residents reporting that they were  

25:57

“very satisfied” with the pilot. Residents spent more time outdoors,  

26:01

spent more time on the street itself, and  had more conversations with their neighbours. 

26:06

People said that they could finally  sleep with their windows open because  

26:09

there wasn’t a constant roar of car traffic.  Unfortunately the results weren’t all positive. 

26:16

While there was a significant decrease in overall  car traffic, the remaining drivers re-routed to  

26:21

the highway much less often than expected, and  so their cars ended up on neighbouring streets. 

26:28

So while three-quarters of  residents along Weesperstraat  

26:31

reported being “very satisfied” with the project. On streets that had an increase in car traffic,  

26:36

74% said that they were "dissatisfied" with it. This is a very clear example of something I’ve  

26:43

talked about many times before:  nobody likes being around cars. 

26:48

So when residents of other streets  got to experience the traffic that  

26:51

the residents of Weepsertraat had been  living with for years, they hated it. 

26:56

It may be that, if the knip had been kept in  place longer, people would have had more time  

27:00

to change their travel habits and start using  the highway more often, but we will never know. 

27:06

Another problem was that emergency vehicle  response times were slightly longer,  

27:10

but personally, I don’t think that datapoint  is very useful, because I predicted it would  

27:14

happen in my previous video. The only reason  emergency vehicles were slowed down by the  

27:18

knip was because they needed to wait for this  gate to go up so that they could go through.  

27:23

But the only reason this gate was here was to  make sure that drivers actually obeyed the knip.  

27:28

If the modal filter was  enforced in a different way, 

27:32

such as with license plate cameras  that have been used on other streets, 

27:35

then a knip could have been installed here without  affecting emergency response times at all. In  

27:40

fact, response times likely would’ve been faster  because there was less car traffic in the way. 

27:45

But regardless, the decision of  the Amsterdam city council was that  

27:48

Weesperstrat was not yet ready for a knip. Instead, the city plans to reduce the  

27:53

speed limit from 50 kilometers per hour to 30  kilometers per hour and reduce the road to one  

27:59

lane in each direction in several places, In 2023, Amsterdam changed the default  

28:05

speed limit to 30 kilometers per hour for  almost every street and road in the city. 

28:09

And I made a previous video about that a  few years ago, link in the description. 

28:12

But some of the streets still need to be modified  so that the physical design better matches the  

28:17

new, lowered speed limit, which will take time. Weesperstraat will definitely require a redesign,  

28:23

which isn’t expected to  start until the end of 2026. 

28:26

But I will make a follow-up  video when that work is complete,  

28:30

to see if it solves some of the problems that  cars are causing for residents on this street. 

28:35

There are lots of other improvements across  the city that I'm skipping here, because  

28:39

there are genuinely too many to talk about. Like how almost all car parking was removed  

28:43

from the streets in this neighbourhood. But I talked about that in my recent video  

28:47

about Ferdinand Bolstraat, which has  also been nearly car-free since 2018. 

28:53

There are lots of cities in the world  that are building great urban places, 

28:57

And I've made videos about  many of them on this channel. 

29:00

But I have never experienced a  city that has improved so many  

29:03

streets in such a short period  of time as I have in Amsterdam. 

29:07

With the only exception being maybe Utrecht, About 20 minutes away by train, 

29:12

Which has also seen some seriously  impressive changes over the past few years. 

29:17

Bicycle Dutch has recently made a video about  that, so I'll leave a link in the description. 

29:23

While street design is a major theme throughout  the Amsterdam Autoluw document, there are many  

29:28

more topics discussed, including improvements to public transit, 

29:32

promoting the use of electric microcars  and light electric trucks for logistics, 

29:37

expanding the use of carshare services, 

29:40

how to build enough housing  for thousands of new residents, 

29:43

how to accommodate people  with physical disabilities, 

29:46

how to deal with taxis and  tour buses, and much more. 

29:50

What I appreciate most though, is how  this plan was actually taken seriously. 

29:56

This is not an aspirational document,  it’s a very clear plan on how to  

30:00

build a sustainable and liveable city. And they aren’t afraid to state the hard  

30:05

fact that most cities try to ignore: that building  a truly liveable city requires having fewer cars. 

30:13

And that means that in planning  and engineering departments,  

30:16

driving must be the lowest-priority  form of transportation. 

30:21

It’s going to be a difficult cultural  change, but it’s one that needs to happen,  

30:26

if we want our cities to be happy, healthy,  productive, accessible, sustainable, and safe. 

30:32

Of course, while installing a knip may  be a great way to keep cyclists safe,  

30:37

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30:42

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30:46

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30:50

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30:54

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30:58

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31:02

Even if you don’t consider that a privacy  issue, there are lots of WiFi networks  

31:06

where they change the speed of your connection  based on which service you’re trying to access. 

31:10

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31:14

it was significantly faster to load YouTube  through NordVPN, because the network couldn’t  

31:19

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31:23

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31:27

Websites show different  languages depending on your IP, 

31:30

American sites block Europe completely because  they don’t want comply with EU privacy laws 

31:34

And I’ve even seen airlines that changed the  price based on which country they think you’re in. 

31:40

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31:44

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31:49

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31:54

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31:59

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32:04

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