Amsterdam ferry strike of 9 September 2026 reviewed: a cycling exodus, a stuck bridge and private boats

The Amsterdam ferry strike of 9 September 2026 is behind us, and the day went largely as announced: the GVB ferries stayed moored from the first scheduled departure to the last. We wrote beforehand that no ferries would run at all and that the IJ tunnel would not open as a cycle route, but living through that is a different matter from reading an announcement. What makes the day interesting for anyone who uses the Amsterdam ferries is not so much that things went wrong, but where they went wrong. The detour worked — right up to the moment the detour itself sat jammed for half an hour. This review sets out what happened on the day of action, how much travel time it really cost and what it says about how fragile the crossing is.

How much travel time the ferry strike really cost

The day before the strike, AT5 ran a test ride that shows exactly where the pain sits. The starting point was Noorderparkbad in Amsterdam Noord and the destination the Stopera in the city centre. On an ordinary day you cycle from Noorderparkbad to the landing in about ten minutes and reach the city hall in roughly twenty minutes in total, including the short ferry crossing. Without a ferry link, Schellingwouderbrug is the only option for cyclists, and that loop turns the same trip into almost three quarters of an hour. By car you could in theory be there in ten minutes through the IJ tunnel, but on a day when all urban transport is halted that is a paper speed, because the roads fill up exactly when everything else stops.

That calculation turned out to be reasonably accurate on the morning itself. A man from Buiksloterham told AT5 that his commute to Nieuwmarkt normally takes fifteen minutes and that he was counting on forty-five that day. A woman stopped at the top of the bridge had left at half past seven and still had not arrived; she reckoned she was roughly twice as long on the road as usual. The weather did not help, with cyclists facing a headwind and pouring rain on the crossing. Anyone used to catching the boat at Centraal Station or at Buiksloterweg discovered that day how large a share of the total journey those five minutes of water actually represent.

Schellingwouderbrug turned into a cycling exodus

Because the IJ tunnel stayed closed to cyclists, microcars and pedestrians, virtually all bicycle traffic between Noord and the rest of the city converged on a single point. AT5 described a cycling exodus over Schellingwouderbrug, and the footage from that morning shows an almost unbroken stream of riders. What stood out was how little irritation came through in the reactions: several cyclists said they understood the strikers, even though it meant a substantial detour for themselves. "It is give and take", said a woman on her way to Weesp, "and right now it is give." The ferry skippers stopped work in protest against government plans to cut social security, including shortening unemployment benefit and reducing disability benefits for the long-term sick.

For the ferries themselves, that picture mainly says something about scale. A crossing that normally takes a few minutes and no thought at all shifts, when it fails, to a single bridge on the eastern edge of the city, kilometres away from where the demand arises. The same applied on the western side, because the link from the NDSM wharf disappeared too and those passengers had to make the identical loop. Our figures on ferry use and crowding show how concentrated usage is on a handful of connections around the centre. It is precisely that concentration which means one day of action immediately reroutes tens of thousands of trips onto a route never designed to carry them.

Then the detour failed as well

The most telling moment of the day came in the afternoon, and it had nothing to do with the strike. Schellingwouderbrug opened to let sailing boats through and then refused to close again because of a malfunction. For roughly half an hour the bridge stood open, leaving a long queue of waiting cyclists, mopeds and cars. Motorists eventually began turning around, but cyclists simply had no alternative: no ferries were running and there was no other way to reach Noord that day. Emergency services were meanwhile informed that the bridge was blocked until further notice, which is not a theoretical problem for an ambulance that needs to cross the IJ.

The bridge is owned by Rijkswaterstaat, and a spokesperson acknowledged the awkward timing to AT5, noting that with the ferries out of service the bridge had become "an important artery". At around 15:45 the deck came back down, because an engineer happened to be nearby and could close it by hand. That detail matters more than it seems: recovery within half an hour rested on luck rather than on a plan. Had that engineer been further away, Amsterdam Noord would have been unreachable for cyclists and pedestrians for hours with no official fallback whatsoever. For a district of well over a hundred thousand residents, that is not a scenario you want to leave to chance.

Amsterdammers organised their own replacement ferry

Meanwhile something appeared that features on no timetable anywhere: a private ferry service. Boat rental firm Canal Motorboats, based in the Zeeheldenbuurt, offered to carry pupils and teachers of the nearby primary school De Zeeheld across the IJ. The reason was practical: seven of the roughly twenty-five teachers live on the other side, and cancelling all their lessons would have affected the whole school day. The firm picked the Noord residents up at the NDSM wharf in the morning and dropped them back there late in the afternoon, using an open boat with room for about forty people. The boat was nicknamed the Zeeheldenboot for the occasion and left the Westerdok at around half past eight in a stiff breeze; neighbouring schools joined the initiative.

It did not stop there. Restaurants and other businesses along the IJ ferried their own staff and customers across, and anyone who knew a boat or a friendly skipper used one. It is a charming picture and it shows the city's resourcefulness, but it is not something policy can be built on. These emergency crossings depended on private initiative, on available vessels and on decent weather on the IJ, and they were not open to anyone who did not happen to belong to such a school or business. For passengers with a walking frame, a wheelchair or a cargo bike full of children — the group that leans most heavily on the fixed ferry link — an open launch was no answer at all.

What the day means for the debate about the crossing

The ferry strike exposed more sharply than any report could that the IJ crossing has no real redundancy. When one ferry route is disrupted you can normally switch to another link or to the metro, but on 9 September all those options vanished simultaneously and what remained was a single bridge that could itself break down. That makes the day relevant to the ongoing debate about a fixed link, which we covered earlier when the Oostbrug was postponed beyond 2034. It is relevant to 2027 as well, when the IJ tunnel closes for more than a year of major maintenance and the ferries will have to absorb even more traffic. Around the day of action the city said it wants to work on a structural solution for the accessibility of Noord, so residents are less dependent on the ferry during future disruptions.

At the same time it is worth keeping a sense of proportion. Public transport resumed during the night of 9 to 10 September and the ferries sailed the next morning according to the regular timetable, including the expansion that took effect on 1 September. One day of action is not a structural failure, and the debate about capacity is a different file from the debate about the right to strike. What the day does confirm is why a thin margin in sailing capacity is such a sensitive issue, something that also runs through the persistent skipper shortage GVB has been dealing with this year. We collect new developments about the crossing and the fleet on the news index.

Pont is not an official GVB product and is not affiliated with GVB, Rijkswaterstaat, FNV or the City of Amsterdam. We summarise public reporting — in this case coverage by AT5 and De Westkrant of 8 and 9 September 2026, supplemented with official information from the city — to look back at what the ferry shutdown meant for passengers. The journey times mentioned are observations from that day, not timetabled figures. The private boat services described here were one-off initiatives too, and they will not automatically reappear during a future disruption. Always check current departure times through the ferry apps or official GVB travel information before you head to the landing.