Amsterdam has come up with a new strategy to help deal with its chronic congestion and shortage of parking—its website is telling people to skip Amsterdam’s paid parking and park free in other towns, continuing by public transit.
Sounds like an environmentally-conscious and logical bit of city planning, right? Well, NOT, according to officials in the nearby towns of Sassenheim, Haarlem and Almore, who are accusing Amsterdam of dumping its parking problems on its neighbors.
The city’s website highlights six out of town Park and Ride locations, pointing out that they are all free to park in. Parking in the city costs €7.76 an hour in the city centre. But in most of those towns, officials say, they created the park-and-ride lots to relieve their own congestion.
Some officials blame the whole problem on the closing of some of the park-and-ride lots at stations closer in to Amsterdam; their sites are to be built over in response to a housing shortage in the Netherlands. Meanwhile, a new report has named Amsterdam as the slowest city in the Netherlands and one of the slowest in Europe to drive in.
