Why does everyone hate the beer bike so much?

When I would ask 10 Amsterdammers what they hate the most, I can assure you that all 10 will shout in unison “the beer bike.” The hatred people have for those things is unbelievable; entire petitions are even created to get a ban on the beer bike. And not just in Amsterdam by the way, in every city where a beer bike can be seen, large waves of protest arise.

I live right in the city center, and at the end of my street is a spot where many beer bikers gather. So not a week goes by without me facing a bunch of 5 of those carts, and even though I don’t have a huge desire for beer bikes myself, I actually don’t quite understand what everyone is so worked up about all the time. Seriously, you beer bike-hating person, try to articulate what makes the beer bike so enormously and incredibly unbearable for you?

Yes, okay, the people on it are often a bit noisy, but I am too after a night of drinking beer. Just like groups of bachelors, should we ban them too? And yes, the beer bikers are mostly men and those men sometimes throw flat jokes at you as you cycle by, but construction workers do that too. Or actually, all men do that. There would be “no place for them” (whatever that may mean), they block the roads (but I don’t think they do that more than a slowly moving car, and you can always easily go around them on a bike) and they attract a “wrong kind of tourists.”

On www.wegmetdebierfiets.nl (yes that site really exists) I read that the crowds in Amsterdam are at the top of the complaint list of the Amsterdammers. Since city marketing is in full swing, it won’t get quieter in the coming time, and “the supply of attractions determines what type of tourist comes. With the beer bikes, floating hot tugs, party boats, disco buses, and bike taxis, the Amsterdam city center attracts the kind of tourists we are not waiting for.”

That kind of text really makes me want to throw up; “what ‘we’ are waiting for.” What an incredibly pretentious and affected fuss. Like: “we visit museums and do Very Responsible Things so we are better.” The city would “turn into an amusement park” and that is something we absolutely should not want. Doesn’t that smell of narrow-minded conservative nonsense? As a resident of the center of that so-called amusement park, I can say that that part of the city has improved enormously in recent years. When I moved into the house I still live in 8 years ago, there was very little fun to do in the area. Nobody wanted to go to “1012” (the postcode of the area where most beer bikes operate) and for trendy cafes or nice restaurants, you had to be in the Jordaan, the Pijp, or West.

But not anymore. The Bijenkorf has improved enormously, W Hotel is opening soon, a Soho House is coming, the Hoxton Hotel has opened, trendy spots are opening on the Rokin that are packed every night, and next September Hausmann (a luxury department store) will open on the same street. How can you still maintain that “the city center is deteriorating?”

It is very fashionable these days to rant that you hate the beer bike so much, because then you always get support and can agree with each other and complain about the low level of all those shabby tourists. But come on people, let those types just have fun on that thing. If you want to stand above it so badly, then really stand above it and don’t let yourself get riled up by a group of overly enthusiastic men on a bike who have to pedal for their beer. Cheers.