Amsterdam is famous for its canal systems, bicycles and artistic heritage. It also houses a number of famous museums and landmarks that includes: Van Gogh Museum, Rijksmuseum and Anne Frank’s House.
There are approximately 881,000 bicycles throughout Amsterdam that are used by daily commuters, children, people on their daily shop or transporting ladders across the 80 bridges in the canal ring (Yes, people actually do this). Bike usage throughout Amsterdam has grown by more than 40% in the last 20 years, this is also means that the use of cars has decreased in this tourist hotspot.
Bicycles weren’t always a thing in Amsterdam, cars once outnumbered bicycles and in the 1970’s bicycle use plunged from a staggering 80% usage down to only 20%. In 1971, more than 3,000 Amsterdam citizens were killed by cars and 450 of those deaths were children, bearing in mind this death figure was produced in only one year. The outcome of this disaster lead to the encouragement of swapping the use of motor-vehicles for the use of bicycles.
A mixed plan from the 1960’s was to fill in the 165 beautiful canals that masked the city centre to make way for new roads to meet the demand of the ever-growing motor vehicle (I am so thankful this did not actually happen). The oil crisis that took place in 1973 shook the whole world, including Amsterdam. This crisis caused the price of oil to quadrupled in price, which effected the production and the running of motor vehicles. Post to the oil crisis- the Amsterdam prime minister, Den Uyl, attempted to encouraged all Dutch citizens to adopt a new way of life and become more environmentally concerned with the way they live their day to day lives. The government then started to introduce Car-Free Sundays: extremely deserted and quiet motorways so empty that children played. This jogged the memory of the citizens of what life was like before the motor vehicle was introduced into their lives.
Amsterdam has a goal to be emission Free by 2025, and they encouraging this goal by swapping out their combustion engine taxis for electric taxis which includes brands such as: Nissan and Tesla. Holland has the highest density of EV chargers compared to the rest of the world. Each month, 25 new charging points need to be installed around Amsterdam’s city centre to keep up with the growing demand. Taxi electric is a fleet of Nissan leaf electric taxi’s that patrol Amsterdam’s. Taxi Electric was the first fully established electric taxi company in Amsterdam which was founded in 2011. TCA is also another electric taxi that operate within Amsterdam who also use Nissan as their EV vehicle supplier, the model that they use is the 100% electric “e-NV200” which seats 4 additional passengers and boasts a 3.1m cubed cargo boot capacity. TCA’s clientele includes: hotels, airports, businesses and people with decreased mobility. TCA’s Nissan e-NV200s only take 30 minutes to charge 80% of the car’s battery and save approximately 200,000 litres of petrol per year.
In 2017, the UK government made an agreement to ban the sales of all new petrol and diesel cars by the year 2040. All car models for sale pre-2040, need to meet an air quality test by passing a new real driving emissions (RDE) test.
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