Amsterdam is ~1000 years old. Parts of it are very unfriendly to cars simply because they were never built to be accessible.
In contrast, Rotterdam was mostly rebuilt after WWII. This gave them the opportunity to make the city more accessible for cars. Still you can get around Rotterdam by metro quite easily, and you are a first class citizen on a bike or on foot. i know lots of people living in Rotterdam who don’t own a car.
Everytime friends from outside Rotterdam cycle here, I warn them that it's not like te rest of the country. In Amsterdam it's not really frowned uppon if you go through a dormant red trafficlight, I wouldn't recommend that in Rotterdam. A lot of children in Rotterdam (in South) don't grow up with a bike, which is very much in contrast with the article imho.
I'm just pointing that out that it's not a total idyllic bike-paradise here imo.
>In Amsterdam it's not really frowned uppon if you go through a dormant red trafficlight, I wouldn't recommend that in Rotterdam.
This really isn't limited to Amsterdam. Even at the zebra crossings where bikes are technically obliged to stop for pedestrians...they (and to be honest, I) most often don't.
Most people here use it as a test of whether you are from Amsterdam. You can tell the locals because they're the ones weaving their bike through the crowd at zebra crossings. I am definitely guilty of this but I use my discretion - because I know the area I have a good idea of how busy it is at which times at which lights. That's why locals do it but tourists shouldn't.
The people who make these unreasonable regulations in the first place must know that they won't be complied with, which makes me wonder if their purpose was simply revenue generation all along.
