Amsterdam Just Closed Their Busiest Road to Cars [video] | Hacker News Reader

Amsterdam Just Closed Their Busiest Road to Cars [video]

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39 pointstfourb8 comments

Meanwhile in Berlin, the conservative government just did the exact opposite.

Yeah, the new Berlin government is a real bummer. They really missed the train in terms of fostering positive change for actual city-dwellers. I think there are reasonable arguments on how to conduct the transition from a car-first to people-first transportation system and how to communicate the process but the conservatives in Germany are really bent on turning back the clock no matter if it makes sense or not.

The video is a bit heavy leaning on demonizing a suggest political rivalry (I don't live in Netherlands so who knows how accurate their description of the political opposition are).

The concept however about removing busy roads going through the middle of cities seems like a good idea. A big benefit the video do not go through is that it removes the small center area as the big center of commerce, and move that to the edges around the ring roads. That allows for a lot of new construction as the city grows. When there is less things to do in the center of the city, traffic will continue to drop down and the center mostly becomes a place of apartments and offices.

It reminds me a bit of how harbors where I live has slowly been moving away from cities, with past harbors being replaced with expensive apartments and offices. When cities grows the benefits of having heavy industry in the center of the city becomes smaller and everyone mostly benefit from it being moved where land is cheaper.

I wonder if six weeks is long enough to measure the lasting effects of such a change.

its probably enough time for the frequenter users to have adjusted their behaviors

You can always say it isn't, just by saying you need higher accuracy than six weeks will provide.

It should be pretty close. Google Maps has robust support for new routes on blocked roads assuming the underlying map data is updated to properly mark the roads as closed.

Traffic can usually fit into 3 main categories.

1. Commuters/Locals - in NL, these people might go into the office once or twice a week, so after a week or two, they will find a new route and update their mental model (assuming they don't use GPS). Locals largely don't need GPS either, but will update their mental model too.

2. Delivery - Largely driven by GPS but some corporate drivers may need a few weeks to update their routes or custom enterprise phone apps.

3. Visitors - Also largely GPS driven but not using any weird apps. Google and Apple Maps will update soon.

As of today, the experiment is halfway over. Looking at Google Maps, the current route to go from Amsterdam Noord to Zuid, suggests taking the highway first with the option to try and cut through the city if you really want to. Taking the highway is shown as the fastest option, but to be fair, it doesn't seem that the route planning tool is taking into account the through closure yet. Choosing to navigate from your phone may or may not give you a heads up about the road closure if you override the recommended route and try to drive through the city center.

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Spanje+-+Monument+Amsterdam+...

Glad to see it

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