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What Amsterdam Can Teach Us About Reclaiming The Streets From Cars
In 1971 the number of traffic casualties rose to a peak of 3,300 deaths , of which more than 400 were children.
The Activist group Stop de Kindermoord (“stop the child murder”) were one of the more memorable groups which arose as a result of this.
Members held bicycle demonstrations, occupied accident blackspots, and organised special days during which streets were closed to allow children to play safely: “We put tables outside and held a huge dinner party in our street. And the funny thing was, the police were very helpful.”
“We simply went to tea with MPs – and they really listened to what we had to say. We cycled with a group of activists and an organ grinder to the house of the prime minister, Joop den Uyl, to sing songs and ask for safer streets for children. We didn’t get beyond the hallway, but he did come out to hear our plea.”
Two years after Stop de Kindermoord was established, another group of activists founded the First Only Real Dutch Cyclists’ Union to demand more space for bicycles in the public realm – organising bike rides along dangerous stretches of road, and compiling inventories of the problems encountered by cyclists.
This group held noisy mass demonstrations with tricycles and megaphones, and nightly ventures to paint illegal bicycle lanes in streets the union considered dangerous.
During the 1973 oil crisis, when the price of fuel quadrupled, The government proclaimed a series of car-free Sundays: intensely quiet weekend days when children played on deserted motorways and people were suddenly reminded of what life was like before the hegemony of the car.
In the 1980s, Dutch towns and cities began introducing measures to make their streets more cycle-friendly the idea was simply to keep cyclists on their bikes.
The Hague and Tilburg were the first to experiment with special cycle routes through the city. Cyclists would change their routes to use the paths. It certainly helped to keep people on their bikes, but one single bicycle route did not lead to an overall increase in cycling.
Subsequently, the city of Delft constructed a whole network of cycle paths and it turned out that this did encourage more people to get on their bikes. One by one, other cities followed suit.
Nowadays the Netherlands boasts 22,000 miles of cycle paths. More than a quarter of all trips are made by bicycle, compared with 2% in the UK – and this rises to 38% in Amsterdam and 59% in the university city of Groningen.
All major Dutch cities have designated “bicycle civil servants”, tasked to maintain and improve the network. And the popularity of the bike is still growing, thanks partly to the development of electric bicycles.
Full article and further reading:
https://lcc.org.uk//pages/holland-in-the-1970s
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