A beautiful Amsterdam, famous as the city of cyclists, and consistently voted best place in the world to get run over by a bicycle by tourists. But it wasn't always this way. In the 1960s, Amsterdam was a car city. The city was sprawling outside of its 19th century boundaries and the future was the automobile. Bicycles were an old relic of the 20th century and Americans were ahead of building the cities of the future. So the Dutch looked to America for inspiration. In the 1960s, American planner David Yokinin was brought into modernize the city. It was assumed that in a modern city, just like in America, most people would choose to live in the suburbs and commute into the city center by car. So the result was Plan Yokinin, a plan to make Amsterdam easily accessible by car. Plan Yokinin had several aspects that were pretty radical by Dutch standards but fairly commonplace in America. The single canal was going to be filled in to make a six-lane highway, forming a ring road around the city center. Access to the ring road would come in from the south and require demolishing the working class neighborhood of Depeype. These highways would lead to an area of high office towers and form a new central business district, which would require demolishing parts of Odevest. It was expected that all visitors to the city center would come in by car, so car parks and taxi centers were planned on the periphery, with monorails, connecting the rest of the city. Of course, monorails. We're not chosen because they were the cheapest or best solution they were chosen primarily because they were raised up above the street and didn't get in the way of cars. Details of this plan that would have pretty much destroyed everything we know of today's Amsterdam were distributed to the public in a brochure, ironically entitled, Give the City a Chance. Seriously. Drawings of the proposed highway probably looked familiar to anybody from North America because they look pretty much like every city in North America. Plan Yokinin may seem crazy today, but it was all part of an ongoing modernization of Amsterdam. This particular plan failed, but other parts of the city were not as fortunate, and several neighborhoods were destroyed to build wide American-style roads as part of a highway plan for Amsterdam. These plans were stopped only because of mass protests by citizens in the 1970s. Since that time, Amsterdam has started a series of repairs to undo some of the damage. This city has significantly reduced the number of car lanes and turned more space over to walking, cycling, and public transit. And bicycle use, which was almost wiped out completely in the 1970s, is now the major form of transportation in the city. But these former highways, now wide boulevard-style roads are still here today, evidence of a crazy car-centric vision of Amsterdam that thankfully never materialized. It's hard to imagine that places like this one could have been highways instead of lively neighborhoods where people live and work. As you probably know, most other parts of the world were not as fortunate with highways having destroyed the fabric of many cities, promoting urban sprawl, consuming city finances, generating intense automobile traffic, and making walking and bicycling dangerous and infeasible as alternatives. Amsterdam successfully fought back against highways and suburbanization, and now it's one of the most livable cities in the world as a result. The question for the 21st century is, what other world cities will follow in its footsteps?