Auto te Gast: How Infrastructures Shape Values and behavior

Fietsstraten ("bicycle streets") represent a particular form of Dutch spatial design: streets where cars are permitted but designated as "guests" to bicycle traffic. Their distinctive road signs (Bord L51), with a blue background and “Auto te Gast” in white lettering, reinforce the car-as-guest ethos with an image of a bicycle riding directly in front of a car. The approach has spread to other types of streets. On roads with trams lines, the bike lanes have been widened and cars shunted onto the tram tracks, making them effectively guests of the trams. Over the last five years, such design changes have shifted average behavior on Amsterdam city-center streets: cars noticeably behave more like guests even when they are not on a formal fietsstraat. There are lots of exceptions, not least aggressive taxi and delivery drivers, but the change is dramatic.

Infrastructures, when they work, are largely invisible, observes Paul Edwards: taken for granted and encoded in peoples’ behavior. At the same time, they are material expressions of values—ideas about how the world should work, about what counts as efficiency, beauty, safety, or civility. These values are built into form: into a curb’s height, a street’s color, a sign’s tone, a line’s thickness. They orient behavior in subtle ways, guiding our movements and expectations long before we think about them.

A fietsstraat embodies the principle that cars are guests; it gives spatial form to an ethics of conviviality and hierarchy. It makes an argument about how people and machines should relate. Yet, as my colleague Ashley Carse points out, use always exceeds intention. As people inhabit and adapt designed spaces, they generate new meanings, sometimes confirming the values embedded in form, sometimes subverting them. With the “Auto te Gast” ethos newly encoded in Amsterdam street design, bikers, drivers, and pedestrians are still negotiating new social norms around a shared public space. As of 2025, the fietsstraat’s promise of bicycle primacy is less a completed achievement than an ongoing negotiation in which power and entitlement are worked out.

The western portion Elandgracht’s 450 meters is marked with the “Auto te Gast” signage of the classic fietsstraat; to the east (across Marnixstraat), the road width and red color remain, but there are no “Auto te Gast” signs, indicating that both bikes and cars have equal right to the whole carriageway. This is where Fietsstraat Amsterdam is filmed—a place where the politics of everyday mobility come into focus, as bikers defend their right of way and cars push back. The film documents how people actually inhabit such designed spaces, often in ways that exceed or subvert planners' intentions. What emerges through extended observation is that these spaces are neither harmonious nor conflictual, but sites of constant micro-negotiation.

Design standards for fietsstraten are set not by law but by CROW, the Dutch knowledge institute for infrastructure and mobility. Its Design Manual for Bicycle Traffic is widely regarded as the gold standard globally for cycle planning, and its guidance on fietsstraten defines what qualifies as a true bicycle street: a red asphalt carriageway, “Auto te Gast” signage, a 30 km/h design speed, and widths proportionate to bicycle and car volumes. Dutch courts often treat CROW norms as best practice, but the fact is that fietsstraten have no special legal status: they work through design, convention, and social norms more than police enforcement.

Amsterdam was slower than some Dutch towns to embrace fietsstraten, focusing on separated bike paths in the 1990s and 2000s. From the 2010s, the city began converting some neighborhood connectors into fietsstraten, following CROW’s guidance. The real turning point came in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic: with quieter streets and political cover, Amsterdam accelerated the program, converting arterial corridors leading into the canal belt into bike streets, both formal fietsstraten and variations (see the Bike Streets entries for some of the variations). Dedicated fietsstraten are still just a tiny percentage of roadways, but they have had an outsized impact on cycling culture. (Check out this interactive map maintained by the city of the cycling network: Plusnet en Hoofdnet Fiets.)

These changes coincided with major infrastructure works — rebuilding collapsing canal walls, moving parking and waste and recycling containers underground, and redesigning public spaces — embedding fietsstraten into a broader vision of sustainable and human-scaled urban life. Together with the rollout of arterial fietsstraten, these measures signal a comprehensive transformation of the city’s streetscape, shifting from car storage and refuse to space for cycling, walking, and neighborhood life.

While planners intend them to embody bicycle primacy, many motorists — taxi drivers, delivery trucks, private cars — resent their constraining logic and treat them as intrusions on their rightful domain. Cyclists, by contrast, often embrace their authority, sometimes slowing cars deliberately by riding squarely in front of them — whether as assertion of right, as lesson, or simply because the design allows it. Cars inch aggressively behind cyclists who deliberately hold the center line; delivery trucks muscle through spaces designed to constrain them; pedestrians, cyclists, and motorists perform subtle choreographies of assertion and yielding. These frictions reveal that the fietsstraat is not a utopia of communitas but a negotiated zone where power, entitlement, and everyday politics are performed at the scale of the street.

Amsterdam’s fietsstraten are part of a wider global moment in which cities experiment with “slow infrastructures.” From Bogotá’s ciclovía (where major avenues close weekly to cars and open to bicycles and pedestrians) to the “Slow Streets” initiatives in U.S. cities like Oakland and New York during the COVID-19 pandemic, municipal governments have sought to reconfigure mobility. In Hamburg and Lisbon, “cool streets” initiatives created shaded, traffic-calmed corridors that doubled as social gathering spaces. In each case, slowing down is not simply technical but political: it redistributes access, redefines whose rhythms shape the street, and provokes contestation between established users.

Comparative perspectives makes clear that slowness is never neutral. In Oakland, residents critiqued pandemic-era Slow Streets as privileging whiter, wealthier neighborhoods, while in Bogotá, ciclovías emerged from grassroots demands for safe and equitable mobility. Amsterdam’s fietsstraten are likewise inflected by histories of urban struggle: from the countercultural provo protests of the 1960s to the ongoing debates about gentrification in Jordaan and de Pijp. What looks like an uncontroversial infrastructure of “bicycle primacy” is in fact a materialization of these conflicts.

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