The Greening of Amsterdam

One of the joys of living in Amsterdam is the opportunity to bike everywhere and at any time. The city is built for and entirely operates around the predominance of bicycles as a means of transportation. It’s not U.S. bicycling, with expensive bikes and helmets. You ride one-speed junker bikes that no one wants to steal, but the city is small and flat, so you don’t care much.  But Amsterdam wants only to become greener and more energy efficient:

The City of Amsterdam has selected Accenture to help implement its ‘Amsterdam Smart City’ program and create the European Union’s first ‘intelligent city.’ The purpose of the Amsterdam Smart City program is to take a comprehensive and coordinated approach to developing and implementing sustainable and economically viable projects that help the city reduce its carbon footprint and meet the European Union’s 2020 emissions and energy reduction targets.

And Amsterdam, apparently, is on the cutting edge of energy efficiency in urban planning. According to Business Week, “unlike cities that could take decades to upgrade their infrastructure, Amsterdam aims to complete its first-round investments by 2012. That makes it one of the first and most ambitious adopters of the smart city concept, attracting attention from policymakers worldwide hoping to glean lessons from the green experiment.” Just last week, on Utrechtsraat, a major shopping avenue in the center of the Dutch capital not far from where I am living, electric trucks have begun to pick up the trash, and the electronic displays on the local bus and tram stops are powered by small solar panels. “Elsewhere, 500 households will pilot an energy-saving system from IBM and Cisco aimed at cutting electricity costs. An additional 728 homes will have access to financing from Dutch banks ING and to buy everything from energy-saving light bulbs to ultra-efficient roof insulation.”