Amsterdam city council is pushing for banned cruise ships from Amsterdam

Sixteen stories high, 294 meters long, more than 3,200 passengers: the Norwegian Prima, the showpiece of shipping company Norwegian Cruiselines, called in Amsterdam this week.

Many Amsterdammers no longer find it a breathtaking sight, the gigantic cruise ships that sail through the IJ. Together with the coaches and British bachelor parties, they have become the symbol of the capital’s out-of-control mass tourism.

Local politicians also like it now. This Thursday, the city council calls on the college to ban the “sailing apartment buildings” from the city. A motion to that effect from coalition parties D66, GroenLinks and PvdA can probably count on a large majority.

According to D66 party leader Ilana Rooderkerk, initiator of the motion, the “extremely polluting” cruise ships in the IJ are “out of date”. She wants Amsterdam to follow the same course as Venice, which has banned cruise ships for two years and has since seen air pollution in the city drop by 80 percent.

According to her, the cruise passenger is the type of tourist par excellence that Amsterdam should get rid of as soon as possible. “Because, like a kind of locust plague, they move into the city center at once, with the associated nuisance,” she wrote in an opinion piece last month. The parole.

Sulfur, nitrogen and particulate matter

Amsterdam has had a cruise terminal since 2000, located on the east side of Central Station. The city is popular among cruisers, according to figures from terminal owner Cruise Port Amsterdam (CPA): until 2018, the number of passengers grew by about 10 percent per year. After a sharp dip due to the corona pandemic, the number of passengers is expected to reach almost 300,000 this year.

And then there are the river cruises, which sail on the Rhine to Amsterdam. More than 2,100 of these will be mooring in the capital this year – good for more than half a million visitors.

This is a relatively small part of the tourist flow that floods Amsterdam every year: the vast majority of visitors come to Schiphol on cheap flights. Nevertheless, the end of cruise shipping could contribute to keeping tourism within limits, says D66 member Rooderkerk. She refers to the “signal value” of 18 million overnight stays that the council established two years ago: if the number of tourists exceeds that, and then it is expected to happen this year, the council is committed to taking “additional measures”. “We want to limit tourism on all sides, so the cruises must also comply.”

The ships keep their engines running during their stay in Amsterdam

The other reason that the coalition factions want to get rid of cruise shipping is climate and clean air. Because although they do not exceed legal standards, the cruise ships pollute quite a bit: except for CO₂ they also emit sulphur, nitrogen and particulate matter. When a large cruise ship was berthed at a shipyard in North Amsterdam in 2021, concerned local residents had an estimate of the emissions made. Investigators calculated that the ship daily produced just as much nitrogen like 31,000 trucks driving a circle on the Ring A10.

An important stone of offense for the opponents of sea cruise shipping: the ships leave their engines running during their stay in Amsterdam, because no power is available from the quay. (This is not the case with the river cruise ships, says CPA.)

As of 2030, this will no longer be allowed due to European rules: then the ships will have to use ‘shore power’. Although CPA director Dick de Graaff “cannot guarantee” that all cruise ships will be able to run on shore power in the future, he says that the sector is “rapidly becoming more sustainable”. “Emissions will in any case fall sharply in the coming years.”

The coalition parties in the council think that sustainability is going ‘too slowly’ and doubt whether the cruisector will be ready in time for this transition. Rooderkerk: “Not all ships can be connected to shore power.”

Will the city council’s wish soon come true? Judging by the past, it does not seem that way: since 2016, the municipality has wanted to move the cruise terminal to the Westelijk Havengebied, but concrete steps have still not been taken.

Formally speaking, Amsterdam can determine the future of cruise shipping itself: the terminal is owned by the Port Authority, which is wholly owned by the municipality. But alderman Hester van Buren (Havens, PvdA) says she wants to make a possible decision “on the basis of research and good considerations” – and in consultation with other municipalities and stakeholders in the North Sea Canal area. “I’m not saying: the terminal will never be moved or scaled down. We think a healthy living environment is very important, but we cannot decide this unilaterally in Amsterdam.”

Cruise policy is not standing still, says Van Buren: the previous council maximized the number of moorings at 190 per year, “while we could be at 300 economically”. A study is also underway into the impact of river cruise shipping.

Van Buren would like to make one thing clear: unlike coalition party D66, the Commission absolutely does not want to call cruise passengers a “locust plague”. “That’s not neat and I would never say that.”