It took the deaths of 400 children to make the people of the Netherlands to realise that their love affair with the car had to end.
Automobiles were seen as the transport of the future in the 1960s, the boom time which followed the war. Entire districts were torn down in order to create space for vehicle travel.
In Amsterdam, the use of bikes plummeted from 80% to 20% between the 1950s and 1970s and most people anticipated that cycle riding would eventually disappear.
But today Amsterdam considers itself the bicycle capital of the world.
The turning point was the statistic of 3,300 deaths, including more than 400 children, from traffic accidents in 1971. Action groups sprung up to protest, among them Stop de Kindermoord (Stop the murder of children) which organised bicycle demonstrations, occupied accident black spots and arranged regular road closures so that children could play safely.
The First Only Real Dutch Cyclists Union soon also formed. It demanded more space for cycling in public areas though mass demonstrations and painting illicit bike lanes in some streets.
Voices were heard eventually as politicians came to see the road death numbers were climbing intolerably and that pollution could become a problem.
The 1973 oil embargo helped the campaigners. Arab oil exporters punished the US, the UK, Canada, Japan and the Netherlands for supporting Israel in the Yom Kippur war by quadrupling the oil price. Dutch people knew they had to reduce their demand for oil.
By the 1980s, Dutch cities and towns were making their streets more accessible for cyclists, modestly at first but eventually by experimenting with special cycle routes through the central areas. These paths encouraged more people to move about by bike, whose popularity is increasing still with the development of electric cycles.
Today 22,000 miles of cycle paths cover the country. The Dutch make more than 25% of all trips on a bike, while in Amsterdam, with an estimated 880,000 bikes, this rises to 38%. In Britain just 2% of trips are with a cycle.
The campaigners are not resting on their laurels, however. They are thinking about new ways to create more space for cyclists and pedestrians as well as searching for a totally new kind of infrastructure as many city centres are not fit for existing car traffic.
Comments
Likewise, I wonder how many deaths it will take on the N125, for Portugal's Neanderthal government to realise that car travel is much safer on the A22 & abolish the tolls in order to facilitate this?