Fietsstraten: Contested Spaces and the Politics of Infrastructures

Fietsstraten ("bicycle streets") represent a particular form of Dutch spatial politics: streets where cars are permitted but designated as "guests" to bicycle traffic. 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. Because Dutch courts treat CROW norms as best practice, these standards are de facto binding, even if not written into law.

Branded in red asphalt and codified in CROW guidance, Amsterdam’s fietsstraten may appear settled, but on the ground they are contested spaces where cyclists assert their priority and motorists negotiate their diminished role. Anthropologist Ashley Carse observes that infrastructures are never finished but continuously remade through everyday practice. The fietsstraat’s promise of bicycle primacy is less a completed achievement than an ongoing negotiation in which power and entitlement are worked out at the scale of the street. The film documents how people actually inhabit these designed spaces, often in ways that exceed or subvert planners' intentions.

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 neighborhood connectors such as Elandsgracht 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). These changes coincided with major infrastructure works — rebuilding collapsing canal walls, moving parking and waste and recycling containers underground, and redesigning public space — 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.

The location, Elandsgracht, brings particular ethnographic depth to these observations. A former canal serving Amsterdam's leather trade, later a market street that sparked food riots in 1917, now a gentrifying corridor lined with cafés and boutiques—the street carries layered histories of working-class struggle and contemporary urban development. The film captures these temporal layers not through historical exposition but through careful attention to who uses the street how: the luxury cargo bikes of young families alongside battered commuter cycles, the tourists consulting phone maps while locals navigate by embodied knowledge. We also see neighbors water the plants in the median and pick up litter unasked, small gestures that sustain a sense of community ownership even as the street’s social composition shifts.

Another collective and contested space is the wide central median that bisects the Elandsgracht. Here, the textures of neighborhood life come into view: teenagers gathering after school, couples stealing a quiet moment, panhandlers collecting empty bottles and cans for the deposit, residents stopping for chance encounters.

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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, made visible in the micro-negotiations between cyclist and taxi, child and panhandler, resident and tourist.