This is evident from a letter from the Department of Transport and Public Space with legal advice about the measure.
Van der Horst presented her plan with a reference to the beer bicycle. It was successfully banned from the center of Amsterdam because riders behaved in a disruptive and rowdy manner. This is also possible with fat bikes, she argued. The often souped-up vehicles are faster and heavier and therefore more dangerous in traffic than other bicycles.
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Fatbike is a bicycle according to the law
The legal advice from the V&OR Department is critical about this. According to the law, the fat bike is simply a bicycle that has been approved for public space. After all, if a higher speed and weight are enough to ban a certain vehicle, racing bicycles and cargo bikes should also be banned.
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And if speed is a problem, the municipality would be better off setting and enforcing a lower speed, although this also has legal pitfalls. For example, a road must be suitable for a lower speed in terms of design.
Rules of conduct in the Vondelpark
The municipality can also set rules of conduct in parks such as the Vondelpark, such as: ‘cycling allowed, but drive slowly and give priority to pedestrians’. The municipality can also enforce more on souped-up fat bikes.
All in all, the legal opinion is that a local ban on only fat bikes would be discriminatory against the groups that mainly travel on those vehicles.