With a barely audible buzz, the white van crosses a bridge over the Amstel river in Amsterdam. An unsuspecting pedestrian crosses the street without looking. Driver Ed hits the brakes. "He didn't hear me coming," he says, shaking his head.
The van belongs to De Kweker, a groceries delivery service. It is one of the few electricity-powered vehicles currently circulating in the Dutch capital. But if the Amsterdam city government get its way all taxis, scooters, cars, vans, buses and even the canal boats will soon be running on electricity.
The city this week presented an ambitious plan to give an "extra impulse" to electric transportation. By 2015, some 10,000 vehicles should be running on electricity. In 2040, all scooters and private cars will have to be electric. In the next two years, the city will set up two-hundred charging stations to accommodate electric cars.
Elsewhere in the Netherlands local governments are also going electric. The province of Brabant is aiming for 200,000 electric cars by 2020. "Electric transportation is the future," says Amsterdam's alderwoman for the environment, Marijke Vos. "It's going to happen no matter what - because it's necessary."
Official statistics show that the levels of nitrogen oxide and fine particles in the Randstad - the metropolitan area that includes Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht - are much higher than in the rest of the Netherlands, despite government efforts to reduce pollution. Plans to ban polluting cars from the city centres have been postponed until 2010.
The air quality in the Netherlands is worse than in most European countries because of the high population concentration. The Netherlands has repeatedly failed to meet European environmental standards.
Unlike combustion engines, electric cars have zero emission. According to Chris Hellinga, who is in charge of sustainable energy research at the technical university of Delft, an electric car's CO2 footprint is almost half that of a conventional car.
But before we can all go electric the technology needs to be improved. It takes three hours for De Kweker's van to be fully charged from a regular electricity outlet. The van's top speed is 25 kilometres per hour and it has an action radius of only 50 kilometres.
Hellinga thinks it will be a while before electric cars become a product for the masses. "We are still not ready to mass-produce lithium-ion batteries," he says. Lithium-ion batteries are smaller, lighter and pack more power than the batteries currently being used in hybrid cars. Hellinga estimates that it will take thirty more years for all transportation to be electric.
Apart from a cleaner environment, electric cars will also greatly reduce noise polluton in the cities. One in five Amsterdammers say they are bothered by the noise of (mainly) scooters and motorbikes. But there is a flip side to reducing engine noise: pedestrians won't hear the cars coming.
"We need to come up with a solution for that," Vos admits.
