AMSTERDAM

o get a sense of the urban planning challenges facing Amsterdam, look no further than the Damrak, the broad avenue running through the heart of the Dutch capital.

Thousands of bicycles jostle for space with cars, trams and throngs of pedestrians. The street feeds into the wide square housing the city’s central train station — a nexus of local, regional and international lines — and the metro system. Around the corner, cruise ships disgorge thousands of day trippers gawping at the city’s sights, as backpackers head for the coffee shops of the nearby Red Light District.

What makes Amsterdam different from other cities struggling to move masses through crowded urban cores is its willingness to experiment with solutions to this problem. It’s way out in front when it comes to bicycles, and it’s an enthusiastic first adopter of more high-tech solutions like autonomous vehicles and shared mobility apps. Uber has chosen the city for its European headquarters, and a series of high-profile industry entrepreneurs are looking to make their mark.

All of that makes it a test bed for the rest of Europe, as urban authorities across the Continent strain to move people around while cutting pollution and ensuring that cities remain livable.

“Amsterdam is a mobility lab for others,” said Jemilah Magnusson from the New York-based Institute for Transportation & Development Policy. “This focus on cycling is what makes everything else in Amsterdam work.”

‘TYRANNY OF CARS’

he most striking difference between Amsterdam and a majority of other European cities is the bicycle.

“Amsterdam has led the way in ending automobile tyranny over public space,” said Jorrit Nuijens, a local councilor for the leftist GroenLinks party over a beer at his local café just beyond the rush of the inner canal ring. “We could continue to be an example to cramped cities worldwide.”

After Copenhagen, Amsterdam is the most bike-intensive major city in Europe, with two wheels accounting for a third of all trips. In cities such as Warsaw and Rome, where cycles account for only 1 percent of trips, bikes tend to be the domain of couriers and spandex-clad office warriors. In Amsterdam, bikes are for everyone — helmets and tight shorts are a rarity.

But bikes must share roads with cars, buses and pedestrians, and as volumes grow, simply providing bike lanes has proven not to be enough. The city is experimenting with ideas like removing traffic lights at intersections to encourage more considerate driving, and it’s laying segments of a new, extra-wide bike lane curving around the center on which the cars are the guests.

“It’s a battle for space,” said Alain Flausch, former boss of Brussels’ metro operator STIB and now president of UITP, a club of global mass transit operators. “One of the major issues for public transport, also for cycling, is how to share it between the different modes.”

As he cycled through the fast-gentrifying De Pijp district, Lucas Harms, a researcher at the Netherlands Institute for Transport Policy Analysis, said Amsterdam’s new tricks offer inspiration to other cities struggling to carve out space for greener modes of transportation.

“Amsterdam is one of the most cycle-friendly cities in the world,” said Harms. “A mature cycling city offers inspiration for others that aspire to a similar route toward a more livable city.”

In order to avoid the fate of London’s nascent cycle “superhighways,” which are often gridlocked, Amsterdam is rolling out a series of small, targeted interventions to relieve bottlenecks across the city.

“It’s a kind of urban acupuncture,” Harms said. The measures include innovative designs for bike lanes, such as the “fries bag,” which widens at traffic intersections, and “banana” lanes that provide more space on curves.

SAYING NO TO HIGHWAYS

hese experiments are possible because Amsterdam has a very different history than other large European cities.

Like much of Europe, the Netherlands underwent a rapid motorization after the war. At first, rates of cycling fell, diving from 80 percent of all journeys in the 1950s to less than 30 percent by the early 1970s, before slowly rising again over the past few decades.

A citizens movement called Stop Child Murder galvanized after more than 3,500 car-related deaths were reported in 1971. Protests, plus the oil shock and riots against the construction of a metro line in 1975, killed off plans to ram highways through the center of the city.

“The number of cars was going up quickly in the 1960s,” said Harms. “People were seeing that they were tearing down their neighborhoods. That was a turning point for a discussion on what role the car should have in our society.”

Cities that pushed on with bulldozing — like Brussels — or encased their downtowns in rings of highways — like Paris — now look to Amsterdam as a model for moving people through cities without destroying buildings and killing off the vibrancy of urban life.

The civic movement in the Netherlands that stopped the highways of the 1970s is still alive — although its targets are now smaller.

As an example, GroenLinks councilor Nuijens cited his party’s campaign to get parking spots reduced on the busy Elandsgracht street running through the hip Jordaan district. He argued that dedicating 80 percent of the road layout to the cars that account for 30 percent of its users is untenable, and that more space should be set aside for pedestrians and communal areas.

Such measures are not uncontroversial, even in bike-friendly Amsterdam, and Nuijen’s proposal faces fierce opposition. As does an effort to add a bright red cycling lane through De Pijp, Harms noted. Residents fear cycle-friendly areas will just attract more yuppies and boost already spiraling house prices.

There are more battles ahead. GroenLinks wants to cut 10,000 parking spots from the city center and even the national government is taking note.

“Cars are part of the total concept, but cities like Amsterdam are not built for [them] so it’s not easy,” said Mark Frequin, the director general for mobility at the ministry for infrastructure.

To secure approval for measures that push cars out of the downtown area, the city needs to make sure it counts on a reliable mass transit system that persuades locals they have the same freedom to move around even without owning their own vehicle.

Amsterdam was a late adopter of an underground metro system — a technology pioneered in 19th-century London. It broke ground on its first line only in the 1970s.

But planners now see the metro as the best way to move large numbers of people through dense cities. Amsterdam’s biggest transport project is the north-south metro line, the city’s fifth, running in part under the Damrak. When it opens next year, it will carry 120,000 passengers a day and halve transit time to 16 minutes between the packed central station and the already at-capacity Zuid station in the business district to the south.

And while the core technology is more than 100 years old, the computers now keeping track of them are new. In the headquarters of GVB, Amsterdam’s mass transit operator, controllers stare at banks of screens feeding data back from 15 tram lines, 41 bus routes and four metro lines. Color-coded blocks stack up, monitoring the system’s punctuality, as staff keep an eye on CCTV feeds flowing in from across the city.

“All [the hubs] are full to their capacity, so you are constantly working in a big puzzle,” said Robert Jan ter Kuile, point man for strategy at GVB. “[The main question is] how can we move the flows around to make it work?”

URBAN PLANNING

rom his apartment overlooking the central station, Walther Ploos van Amstel, a logistics lecturer at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, said a formidable challenge is the number of intercity commuters, which is rising as low-paid workers are priced out of city centers and relocate to cheaper digs out of town.

Amsterdam is home to 850,000 people, ballooning to around 1.4 million in the wider metro area. Like many of Europe’s large cities, it’s still growing. During the next decade, at least 50,000 new homes will be built around its periphery and 100,000 new jobs are expected to be created in its core. Brexit could add even more as banks and other institutions weigh the attractions of the Dutch capital over London’s City.

Zoom out and Amsterdam is part of a vast metropolitan area of more than 7 million called the Randstad, running from the seat of government in The Hague to the Port of Rotterdam and forming one of the densest megalopolises on the Continent.

Daily, some 120,000 people leave the capital for work while 360,000 head in, according to Van Amstel.

Add that to the ever rising number of tourists and it contributes to an annual increase of 10 percent in rail traffic around parts of Amsterdam, compared to 3 percent a year nationally, said Heike Luiten, director at Dutch state rail company NS.

“What we know is that it is getting busier and busier,” said Luiten during a conversation in her office. “The future is coming closer faster than in other parts of the Netherlands.”

With those challenges pressing down on them, Amsterdam’s city council pulled together a comprehensive plan in 2015 for its future development up to 2040. The idea is to make the city denser by building on less-used spaces near the core, while expanding the reach of the mass transit system to link up urban areas across Amsterdam’s commuter belt.

APPS AND ELECTRIC CARS

o far, so traditional. But the city is also enthusiastic about new transport technology.

Self-driving buses have been trialed to get passengers out of Schiphol Airport to the commuter city of Haarlem. While similar projects across Europe used minibuses over short routes, the airport route ran 20 kilometers. Autonomous boats — going under the prototype name “Roboats” — sail test runs along Amsterdam’s 50 kilometers of waterways.

Peter Litjens, the city’s deputy mayor for transport, said he’s in talks with companies on getting waste and cargo shifted to barges to get more trucks off Amsterdam’s roads. But already congested waterways heaving with sightseeing traffic and a speed limit of 6 kilometers per hour dampens prospects for the waterways becoming new expressways.

To try to piece together the last mile of commuter trips, Uber and its local ride hailing rival Abel offer another way of getting private cars off the road while pitching themselves as useful to city authorities through the data they collect on routing and pick-up locations.

There are more high-tech solutions being tried.

Yeller is an app that helps visitors meet to share a cab; WeGo allows people without cars to rent from local car owners; and Mobypark, based in Paris and Amsterdam, shows free parking places.

Amsterdam has also drawn the attention of Finnish tech entrepreneur Sampo Hietanen, founder of the Whim mobility app.

For a monthly fee, he wants to offer a point-to-point journey that incorporates everything from bike and car rental to buses and trains, taking care of all charges and ticketing. He launched the service in Helsinki, gaining worldwide publicity, and is looking to see if he can do the same in Amsterdam this year.

Still, all of these are micro-technologies. There are so far only 29,000 electric car owners in Amsterdam, according to Amsterdamsmartcity, a municipal urban innovation community — adding up to only a single digit percentage of the capital’s car fleet. Sharing accounts for less than 1 percent of car use.

“This enthusiasm about driverless cars and buses, about digitalization, it’s funny and interesting but also premature,” said Flausch, the head of the mass transit lobby. “An industry does not digest all this innovation over a weekend.”

For now, the dense crowds on the Damrak are shuttled to their destinations with traditional methods — buses, trams, bikes and subways — overlaid with high-tech traffic management schemes. But if there is a technology that will be driving transportation in the future, chances are it’s being trialed in Amsterdam.

This article is part of a special report on urban mobility.