Amsterdam – Page 6 – Wis[s]e Words

Pay no attention to the software behind the curtain

Published on May 20, 2010

Bit of a bother with my bike today. A couple of weeks ago I had finally gotten a new bike, after my last one had been stolen more than a year ago. At the hospital S. is unfortunately still in there’s a bike repair place which also sells secondhand ones and when I looked there they had a nice, proper Raleigh bike, one of those that you can’t help but ride sitting up ramrod straight, for less than 200 euro. In very nice condition and looking as if it came straight out of the fifties, I was a bit wary of leaving it out on the streets. Which is why I usually stall it in the underground automated parking at the ferry when I go to work. And this uses some sort of Windows based software to do all the work, which I know because the first time I wanted to use it, it had blue screened. Not a good start, but I had been using it without problems ever since.

Until today. Checked my bike in with no problems; wanted to check it out tonight, no go. The chip and pin machine, with which you pay and which uses your bank card to recognise which bike you’re attempting to collect, was borked. So I called the emergency line, they asked the usual questions, then got me called back by somebody with some clue, he asked for the last four digits of my bank pass, then used that to locate and get my bike. The video above shows the physical side of that process; thanks to the monitor screen normally used to explain the system, I got to see the software side of things. It could’ve been an old skool DOS programme, a light blue background with hideously big buttons, with a list of ticky boxes in red (occupied) or green (free) followed by the bank pass number (only the last four digits shown iirc) the customer had used. The admin checked mine and hit the button “get bike” et viola, there it was.

As a card carrying geek it’s always interesting to get such a look at the software behind the curtain — and because it was a nice hot day, I had no problem waiting a bit longer than normal to get my bike either!

Amsterdam taxis: free market fail

Published on August 6, 20091 Comment

For personal reasons which I won’t bore y’all with, we’ve been forced to make a lot of use of the incomparable Amsterdam taxi system lately. It’s not been a good experience, the one or two excellent drivers notwithstanding. Our experiences are not unique; Amsterdam taxis are some of the worst in Europe, as I’m sure Frumious Bandersnatch will agree with:

However, I’ve heard that it has gotten better at Central Station. I heard that they have supervision. And I actually didn’t have a choice. So I walked to the head of the line.

First thing that I noticed. No supervision. No idea if he/she was getting coffee or just gone for the day. Uh-oh.

I went to the first driver in the row. He informed me that this would be 15 euros. I said that I wanted to go with the meter. He said that he only worked with a zone system, so it was 15 euros everything between 1-5 kilometers. (I know from experience that a taxi ride to where I needed to go was generally maximum 12 euros) I told him that I knew this wasn’t true and I had the right to go with the meter. He told me to “go find a TCA driver since they charge less.” He insisted that they were allowed to charge more for central station. (For non-Dutch people, TCA was the former big bad monopoly that got broken up in Amsterdam to protect the consumer. Ha.)

I looked around again to see if I could find their minder, but there was nobody visible. I went to the second taxi in the row. That person also refused to drive with the meter to Oost, and told me that I had to go with the first taxi. “Nobody here will use the meter,” he told me snottily.

The third taxi was from TCA. He told me that I had to go to the first taxi. He got abusive when I said that the first driver refused to go with the meter. He said “I won’t drive with the meter either.” By this point, one of the other drivers in the line had shouted at me to “fuck off”.

Another TCA taxi driver (farther back in the line) said that he didn’t dare to do otherwise besides do what the rest in the line did.

It doesn’t get any better from there. Such experiences are all too common, especially around the tourist heavy areas of the city centre like Central Station or Museumplein. The irony is, for most tourist destinations there are plenty of cheap, easy to use and fast public transport options to use instead. but if you don’t know that as a tourist, your natural instinct is to use a taxi and nine times out of ten they’ll take you for a ride. Central Station to Dam Square, with its quota of fancy hotels, is only a ten minute walk or a five minute tram ride; take a cab and they’ll either tell you to fuck off for wasting their time with such a short ride (that’s the honest ones) or they’ll show you the entire city and deliver you there an hour later.

The problem is that Amsterdam went from a monopoly situation in which there was only one taxi company, TCA, which only had to provide Soviet levels of service, to one in which everybody with a dodgy twenty year old Mercedes Benz could call himself a taxi driver. Too many taxi drivers chasing too few customers with no time for short rides, no time to be concerned with anything but getting the next fare in. Neither situation was ideal, to say the least.

The Amsterdam taxi market needs reform badly, but any solution that leaves either a load of freelancers or some sort of monopoly or duopoly in place isn’t going to work. In both cases there is the problem that the people driving the taxis are entirely dependent on their taxi to make a living and the pressure to chase golden rides remains. What Amsterdam needs I feel is to make the taxis into some sort of semi-public transport, with the drivers on a proper wage and the customers knowing what they get into when they step into the cab.

Fewer Brits in Amsterdam

Published on January 21, 2009

With some two to three million unemployed already in the UK there were always going to be fewer people taking their stagnight to Amsterdam, but the ongoing war on fun cannot help. For years now the Amsterdam city council has tried to attract a higher class of tourists, wanting to present the city as one of culture and musea rather than of hookers and coffeeshops. So far this has met with little succes, but the city has managed to alienate many of the traditional visitors. What Amsterdam has been aiming at is the high value tourist, who wants to stay in a nice hotel and eat in expensive restaurants after a day of visiting the Rijksmuseum or van Gogh museum and browsing through quaint little antique or fashion shops. To make room for those tourists the city council has been on a crusade against the traditional attractions of Amsterdam: the Red Light district, the coffeeshops and the whole infrastructure of backpacker hotels and kebab shops.

To me this strategy never made sense other than as an expression of misplaced snobbery, as Amsterdam, nice town that is, really has little to offer this kind of tourist cannot find anywhere else and better. You want culture, high end shopping and fine dining? Why go to Amsterdam if you can go to Paris, or London, or Barcelona, or Vienna or Moscow even, or…

Sure, there are plenty of other party towns in Europe as well; Prague or Riga for example, which also attract a lot of British tourists out on a stag do or hen weekend. But Amsterdam is unique in that you could party safely here: do a bit of harmless experimenting with drugs or visit a live sexshow without fear of the police. Especially the coffeeshop gave Amsterdam its reputation as a city where everything goes. For all the foreign politicians who railed about it there were hundred of young people who wanted to come over. But no more. Tourism is flagging, the Brits are staying home or moving on to cities that do appreciate them. In hindsight, putting mayor Job Cohen on UK television warning boozing Brits to stay away might not have been the smartest idea…

Dutch mayors call for legalised cannabis

Published on November 26, 2008

Amsterdam coffeeshop

Only a few weeks ago it seemed the Dutch tolerance towards soft drugs would end soon, due to the increasing strength of the puritan movement in Dutch politics. Magic mushrooms are already banned, while the future of the coffeeshop seemed limited, due to cheese paring measures forced on city councils like the rule that no coffeeshop could be located within 500 metres of a school. Try and find a coffeeshop in Amsterdam that doesn’t…

Meanwhile the growing troubles caused by socalled drugs tourists from France, Germany and Belgium in border towns had already led several of those towns to close down their coffee shops altogether. The future therefore seemed bleak for the ordinary cannabis user in the Netherlands, who smokes it recreationally or to relief pains and nausea (for which it works quite well, as I’ve seen myself, better than many conventional pain killers or nausea relievers). Though the system had worked reasonably well for some three decades, making going to the coffee shop almost as normal as going down the local for a quick pint and a half, it had always been a stopgap, an attempt to regulate cannabis trade without legalising it, as that would be difficult to explain abroad. It was introduced as a measure to free police resources for the battle against hard drugs as well as to limit the dangers of cannabis users “graduating” towards harder drugs. As such it worked well, but there never was the intention on the part of the authorities to go any further towards legalisation. It was a policy they were forced into but never were comfortable with.

Tolerance as a policy, even had it had the full support of politicians and police, could never continue forever. The inherent contradictions of the policy, which made it semi-legal to buy and sell cannabis at a retail level, but illegal to sell wholesale, let alone grow it, would see to this. But because we could never make the choice of legalisation without incurring the wrath of France and America, nor end Tolerance altogether the situation did continue. The hobbyists and smalltime growers who had been the base of the cannabis culture in the Netherlands were driven out by organised crime causing huge problems for many city councils.

The way these criminals operate is to go to an impoverished neighbourhood in Rotterdam or Tilburg or someplace simular and get a front man to hire a house from the council or housing society. This is then turned into a full blown industrial cannabis nursery, powered by stolen electricity from the neighbours. They only need to keep the flat on for several months, until harvest time, then disappear and make a huge profit selling their harvest to the coffeeshops. Despite everything the councils do to combat this, there’s little risk for the real criminals themselves: they leave everything to their patsies.

So it’s no wonder that the mayors of some thirty cities, including Amsterdam, last Saturday called for an end to this situation, by regulating the “backdoor of the coffeeshop”. What they want is to legalise the growing of cannabis by putting it under state supervision and allowing coffeeshops to legally buy their supplies from these suppliers. This would end the involvement of organised gangs, regulate the awkward situation the coffeeshops themselves are in now where they’re forced to buy from criminals, not to mention provide amuch needed source of income for local councils. It’s a good idea, but at the moment it still seems unlikely the central government will take the councils on, as the governing parties are largely opposed to legalisation.

Sucking the fun out of Holland

Published on November 12, 2008

Apropos of my post on the predicted end of the coffeeshop by 2010 comes this interesting summation of all the nanny state measures that have been implemented or proposed in the past year or so. IT comes from a Llamasoft message board of all places and it’s far from complete, but it gives a good overview of the current moral climate in the Netherlands.

You may not believe it when you only know Amsterdam by reputation, but there’s a strong puritanical streak in the Dutch character as well as a long tradition of tolerance, and the pendulum has swung towards puritanism again. The people in power this last half decade have all been Mrs Grundys at heart, wanting to force their ideas of what’s right and proper on the rest of us. As with most of their ilk, they’re not so much concerned here with morality as with propriety. They’re less concerned that e.g. closing down legal brothels will drive prostitution back into the underworld with al the dangers that go with it (sex slavery, increased risk of STDs, undsoweiter) as they are with the idea that the Red Light district is an eyesore and would be much better if it was filled with trendy fashion boutiques and artist workplaces… It’s this attitude that has led to the vertrutting, the disney-fication of Amsterdam.