Why Amsterdam is Removing 10,000 Parking Spaces

Amsterdam’s plan to remove 10,000 on-street parking spaces by 2025 is already underway—and the city is treating parking as a traffic and safety problem, not a neutral convenience. The core idea is straightforward: street parking consumes scarce public space, increases crashes and congestion, and encourages driving by making car trips easier to complete. Amsterdam has been reducing curbside capacity through a mix of policy “attrition,” street redesigns, and targeted removals tied to construction and canal maintenance.

The push is politically and culturally contentious because drivers often expect cheap or free parking everywhere. Even in a city where only about 40% of households have a car, streets can look dominated by parked vehicles—meaning a minority of residents consume a majority of public curb space. That curb space also creates predictable hazards: parked cars reduce sightlines at side streets, and drivers pulling out of parking spots add conflict points for everyone else, including cyclists who face serious injury risk from door openings. On top of safety issues, street parking disrupts traffic flow, and on commercial streets the “parking is needed for business” argument doesn’t hold up well—most shops have room for only a couple of cars, and turnover rates and revenue potential rarely match the scale of the space being surrendered.

Amsterdam’s approach starts with permitting rules. Each on-street space requires a permit, so when residents sell cars or move away, the city doesn’t automatically replace permits. That “attrition” method frees roughly a thousand spaces per year, but it’s not fast enough to hit the 10,000 target. To accelerate reductions, the city is rebuilding streets with fewer parking spots whenever construction happens. One example in Amsterdam South is a redesign that will make cycling safer while cutting about 140 parking spaces on a relatively busy corridor. Other projects remove parking for practical reasons, including canal wall maintenance: removing heavy loads on canal edges can extend the life of old structures, and Amsterdam has already removed parking along some canal sections with a longer-term goal of eliminating car parking along canal areas in the city center.

Not every experiment sticks. A 2019 trial that removed parking on one street and replaced it with temporary planters and bike parking depended on resident buy-in; the street later reverted. But a broader neighborhood removal along the Frans Halsstraat and nearby streets used the freed space for trees, greenery, bicycle parking, and small public amenities, with plans for a permanent redesign.

A major twist is where the cars go. In one case, 300 on-street spaces were removed and replaced by a multi-level parking garage built under a canal, with capacity for 600 cars and many electric charging spots. The goal still counts as removing on-street parking, but it raises a concern: off-street parking can increase driving by making car trips feel more reliable. That matters because Amsterdam’s city center is not fully pedestrianized; cars remain widely allowed, and weekend traffic into the canal ring often comes from people shopping—enabled by large park-and-ride garages.

So far, Amsterdam has removed over 4,000 on-street spaces, and the city expects the number to climb as construction finishes. The changes are framed as incremental but meaningful: less curbside parking means safer, more inviting streetscapes, even if it isn’t a complete solution on its own.