With weather apps that give you the rainfall down to a few minutes, you can escape the weather by either biking in the lulls, participating in a e-bike scooter sharing system, or falling back on public transport when you need.
Very rarely can you get someone faster by driving than you could by biking or public transport (at least according to google maps) so long as you live within the ring. Outside of that I don’t think cars are going anywhere, and there is ample parking near the major public transport hubs. I know plenty of people who park there and take a quick train or metro to their work and don’t complain about the hassle.
It’s a different way of living and I miss driving sometimes but it’s really nice once you acclimate!
I think I was in "the ring", if we're talking about the adjoining canal systems that circle around the center part of the city.
..coming from a city where cars will speed up if they see you crossing the road, and regularly muscle bikes into the gutter.
Hey, I just made an account to ask what weather app you're talking about? I have tried Dark Sky and Buienradar on iOS but they don't seem to send rain notifications as expected. Right now I'm looking out the window and it's raining (like, the water is collecting on the ground/rooftops) but neither app has notified me. I've just checked to make sure that they have notifications and location access allowed as well.
If your travel stays inside the ring (the highway circling the city), yes, travel time is not that long. Although 15 minutes is optimistic. While I have destinations I usually reach in 10-15 minutes, there are other places that take me 25-30 minutes. Which I don't find worth complaining about anyway, but not everything is 15 minutes away.
Living inside the ring is very expensive though, and many workplaces are outside of it. In that case, biking can take 45 minutes to an hour, or become impractical. I have friends living in neighborhoods from which biking is impractical (Bijlmer, Geuzenfeld).
You can always take public transport, of course, and mix it with biking. But biking through a city with 800.000 inhabitants in 15 minutes is not possible.
Electric scooters are around, though. There are a ton of mopeds at the moment, but I share your suspicion that they'll eventually be banned (and I don't totally hate the idea -- Amsterdam would be incredibly quiet without them).
[1] https://newmobility.news/2019/04/08/mopeds-in-amsterdam-no-l...
[2] https://nltimes.nl/2019/09/16/amsterdam-use-cameras-enforce-...
[3] https://www.vraaghetdepolitie.nl/verkeer/overig-verkeer/mag-...
Walking is great and effective. Biking works well too. Public transport is there for you too. Keep 1-2 extra "station bikes" parked in practical locations around town. Then you can use whatever method you want based on the circumstance.
You can't ride an electric scooter on the sidewalks (or the paved areas in front of shops and such); it's just too chaotic, with stones and gaps and things that won't do well with scooters. And you would have to be pretty bold to ride a little scooter on a bike path along with all the people who are on bikes (you WILL have a collision at some point, and you'll be on the losing end when compared to a big Dutchman on a 50lb steel bike)... or worse yet, a big moped will run right over you.
My advice is go there and be open minded and flexible. You'll find a mode or combination of modes that works (everyone else does).
I don't know the accident statistics offhand, so this might justify our refute your point.
A child's kick scooter is small, but adult sized electric ones are long and fairly bulky.
A folding bicycle is roughly backpack sized, and easy to stand over (like a backpack) on a metro train.
Further you can still take taxis, rideshare or rent something like a car2go, for which parking is more feasible, if you use it every now and then.
I mean... what else is there to want?
I would add Amsterdam is one of the easiest cities to get around in, I don't know why you would exclude public transport as an option as it is clean and efficient there.
Careful here. "Scooter" can mean two different things in English. It can be a moped (which is what Dutch people call a scooter), which is entirely legal in Netherland if you've got insurance for it; or it can be a motorised step, which is currently illegal. Although that's not stopping one of my co-workers from using one for his commute.
Also legal are e-bikes, although that's a developing issue, as they're technically electric mopeds, which means they require a helmet, whereas the users would prefer to see them treated as a bike, which wouldn't require a helmet. I don't think anyone actually uses a helmet (except on the super fast ones), but legally they should.
Honestly that sounds a bit like "what are my options for breathing other than using my nose or my mouth?".
Live in one of the satellite towns and commute with the train. You'll have a proper quality of life and commuting here is easy.
I live about an hour commute from Amsterdam in an area where the air quality is considerably better than it is in the cities.
They have been banned.
https://www.amsterdam.nl/veelgevraagd/?productid=%7BB9B8F66D...
Edit: Everything I read about these urban Paradise concepts screams "small town" to me. Where I grew up, that was how a small town functioned and of course it was quite nice. But that is not how a city functions.
Personally, I wonder how long it will take cities to depopulate after they made commuting too hard. In my observation, the car just acts as a proxy for the conflict between people living in the city and people that merely work there.
This concept of a city didn't stop cities from functioning before cars and it won't stop cities from functioning after them.
If we're going to identify something key to the growth of cities, surely it is mass transit. Much of this isn't apparent in modern cities in the USA because so many of them tore apart their streetcar systems in the middle of the 20th century as policies shifted to favor the private automobile. But mass transit seems to me like the thing that drove the growth.
A more apt comparison might be London right before the car became common place, though.
Rome's 1M population is a disputed number. Cities of tens of million inhabitants are all post-industrial and none work solely on mass transit. The car is an essential piece of the equation.
Car-less cities are an interesting thought experiment, but none has gone past the implementation barrier. That part of the equation should go into the though experiment.
Can you provide a link? I'm either confused about what "Victorian" or "London" mean, because it seems to me that metro London definitely had over 1M people in the late 19th century.