Mastodawn

Remember this picture, & others like it, every time you hear someone in your city say "we're not Amsterdam." This was #Amsterdam in the 1970s. Many of the cities we admire made tough choices regarding cars in the past, and are still making better choices today. Better choices instead of excuses.

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Tor Lillqvist 1d ago

@brenttoderian.bsky.social This image keeps going around. Somebody needs to dive deeper into the story. (I am not volunteering, any more than the little I did below.)

Note: I am very much against car-centric city planning. But I am also against blindly repeating claims that might be misleading.

This street is apparently Zeilstraat. It is still used by cars. It seems to have four lanes nowadays, not five. And lots more cycle traffic. I am not claiming it has traffic jams like in the picture very often, I have no idea. But I don't know how common such traffic jams were in the 1970s, either. Anyway, this street still is used by cars.

Was the centre of #Amsterdam in general like this in the 1970s? Hardly. Most streets were as narrow as they are now.

A more useful post would be one showing some other street in the 1970s *and* now, with the current state being more pleasant, with reduced parking, trees planted, etc. And including some statistics about how car traffic has decreased and cycling increased in the centre of Amsterdam, as I assume it has.

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Sheean Spoel

@tml @brenttoderian.bsky.social during this time period, like in many other cities, the 'modernization' process involved bulldozing and making way for cars, you can see a sharp decline in bike usage. It has gone up since then and there are plenty of situations where you can get before-after comparisons where the fairly recent improvement is very clear (just on the top of the hat: Plantage Middenlaan, Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal, Sarphatistraat). Not just inside city centers, I think the most overlooked transformation is outside of these. Everybody likes the scenic pictures from Amsterdam and other quaint Dutch cities (and I've lived in Amsterdam and I'm living in one of those other old cities right now!) But I grew up in an 80s suburb at the edge of a smaller city, and even there are fully separate bike paths *everywhere*. I could bike on my own to primary school, no problem. https://international.fhwa.dot.gov/pubs/pl18004/chap02.cfm There's also this nice video comparing 1993 to 2025 in nearby Utrecht: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFPNHm5IUvc