In my experience, cars are discouraged from city centres, but not banned. You can drive your car all around Amsterdam, although you’ll have many one way streets and parking is going to very expensive for non-residents… and it’s hard (but not impossible) to find street level parking. Amsterdam has a number of car parks in the outskirts that are cheap if you can show that you used public transport afterwards.

The result is that people use their car (if they have one, still quite common esp. for families) to get out of the city, or big errands, but use bike or public transport for day to day trips.

Actual car free zones exist in cities across Europe but tend to be pretty small and constrained to the hyper centre, like the church square and the major shopping streets. Not that I’m opposed to them being bigger but that seems rare at this point.

> Such old urban places would just be car-free in the Netherlands

that's the hardest part that everyone always ignores.

first you have to remove cars from the streets, than it's becomes easier to implement biking infrastructures.

I've been a long time petitioner to completely ban car traffic from the neighborhood where I live, but it's been a lost battle in the past 20 years.

Changing human habits it's harder than it looks.

I'm not saying that Amsterdam was built from scratch, nor that Rome is somewhat so special that you can't apply solutions used elsewhere, but that urban space is an hard requirement and the more dedicated infrastructures you build, the more the value of the area goes up and so we end up with those beautiful walkable, green, neighborhoods in Milan where the "Vertical Forest" is that only the very rich can afford.

And in those parts of the city where space is basically free, people live too far from where they need to go by bike anyway.

It's a cat and mouse game, you need very dense, very small, almost flat cities, to get to the point where Amsterdam is, which is not that typical especially in Europe.

cars are not allowed to hit pedestrian or bikes on any street, but they do all the time.

disallowing something doesn't make it non existent.

In the neighborhood where that picture was taken live approximately 15 thousand people and many more come every night to hang out.

I know it's bad, I do not approve people going everywhere with their cars even when it's obviously wrong, but it is what it is, and it doesn't make the problem go away.

Street space is premium space in cities.

I wish we could simply stop this car madness by wishful thinking, but we can't.