The City Council of the “Venice of the North” voted for the motion with a large majority. “Cruise ship visitors are “daytrippers” and don’t benefit the economy”. At the same time, in the real Venice calls have resumed to bring cruise ships back to Marittima station by excavating the old Vittorio Emanuale canal.
21 July 2023
Too many tourists crowding the streets and alleys, suffocating the city; and therefore the city administration of Amsterdam has banned cruise ships from the city center.
Among other things, the giant cruise ships are considered to be too polluting and not in line with the city’s goals for sustainability; it will therefore close the port terminal on the IJ lake, in the waterfront area near the main railway station of Amsterdam. The motion passed by a large majority.
This is the newest measure Amsterdam has taken to manage the problem of so-called ‘overtourism’, the ‘tourist overcrowding’ that not only has a negative impact on the tourists’ experience but also on the lives of those who live in a tourist ‘paradise’.
All this is happening at precisely the moment that in Venice calls have returned to bring cruise ships back to the docks of the old Marittima station by excavating, deep in the lagoon, the old Vittorio Emanuele canal [Ed. note: this idea was the one favored and pursued by the city administration for several years before the current law sent ships to Marghera.]
The Amsterdam city council voted to close the port terminal for environmental reasons as well. “The polluting cruise ships don’t correspond with our city’s ambitions for sustainability”, explained Ilana Rooderkerk, leader of the center-right party D66, which manages the city with the social democratic PvdA and the environmentalist GroenLinks.
Among other things the passage of the cruise ships was also not compatible with the plans for a new bridge between the historic South quarter of the city and the North quarter, the focus of recent development projects.
Over 100 cruise ships dock each year at Amsterdam and bring to the “Venice of the North” a good part of the 20 million tourists that visit it annually. The city has for some time been trying to curb the rowdy and rude behavior of tourists, for example bachelor parties, especially near the red-light districts where the prostitutes work.
Among these efforts, in March the city administration launched an advertising campaign of “discouragement” aimed at young people, especially British, who arrive in search of alcohol and drugs: a campaign bluntly entitled “Stay Away” and aimed at the crowds of noisy and petulant youth who bring problems to the city without contributing to its coffers.
Amsterdam wants to keep a limit under ten million overnight stays annually (currently there are almost 20 million, while in 2010 there were 5.3 million). A study in 2021 calculated that the daily nitrogen emissions of a cruise ship were equivalent to that of 31,000 trucks driving around in circles on the city bypass. And the tourist brought by the cruise ships are the classic “daytripper” types of arrivals.
“Like a sort of plague of locusts, they move into the center of the city all at once, with all the associated annoyances: they don’t have much time for the museums, but they do visit the red light districts”, Rooderkerk wrote last month. “The local economy does not actually benefit from these “daytripper” visits: the advantage goes to the mainly international cruise ship companies”.
Source: La Nuova di Venezia e Mestre
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