When you step out of the central train station in Amsterdam and encounter a sea of bicycles –and a three-story parking garage made for bikes instead of cars–it’s easy to imagine that the city has always been bike-obsessed and that a typical North American city could never pull it off.

A new photo series, showing certain intersections in Amsterdam around the turn of the 20th century, then in the 1970s and 1980s, and finally today, was created to prove otherwise.

“The most beautiful places in Amsterdam–the places where all the tourists like to go, and all the Amsterdammers like to go to sit on patios, enjoy markets, relax–all of those places used to be used as parking lots,” says Cornelia Dinca, founder of Sustainable Amsterdam, who started collecting the photos as a master’s student at the University of Amsterdam. “This was really surprising to me.”

It’s true that Amsterdam was an early adopter of the bike, but so were places like Brooklyn, where bike clubs successfully pushed for a bike lane as early as 1895. As post-World War II incomes rose in Amsterdam, people also started to buy more cars, mirroring what was happening in the U.S.

“There was definitely a big displacement of bicycles,” says Dinca. “That had everything to do with the Dutch fully embracing the North American model. It was a lot of American experts who were coming to Amsterdam. It’s really fascinating to see the old plans that were drawn up to tear down old parts of the inner city and put in highways and multilevel parking garages. Some of those were partially implemented.”

The government started to build high-rise apartment complexes on the outskirts of the city. “It was more sprawl-based, much more car-centric,” she says. “The city had decided this was where people were going to live.” At the same time, the city started planning to build up the center for business.

But two groups started to resist. Some young people, who wanted to stay in the inner city, started squatting in buildings so they couldn’t be knocked down. Historical societies also protested. Still, the city didn’t really start to change direction until the growing traffic started to cause record numbers of pedestrian and cyclist deaths–especially those of children. Suddenly there were large-scale protests across the city.