Amsterdam is notoriously famous for being a bike city. There are far more bikes (by many multiples) than cars. And bikes have the right of way – if a car hits a bike, or even a bike runs into a car – the car is at fault. There are bike “lanes” that are like their own mini streets right alongside the road.
In so many other places, this would be unfathomable.
But in Amsterdam, that’s just the way it is.
I could even imagine that, without much fuss, Amsterdam could ban cars completely – first from the canal ring roads and then to the edges of the center. And people probably wouldn’t bat an eye.
On the other hand, you can imagine the uproar if they took cars off the streets in Manhattan (hello cabbies!).
And yet, that would only be a small shift in Amsterdam.
Change might be uncertain or scary, but after a while, that “new” change just becomes the way things are. So the next time you’re sweating a change, worrying you or someone else will hate it, remember…pretty much all the changes that have ever happened are now “just the way it is”…
Bikes as far as the eye can see!