Two Lanes off the Bridge

The School Gate

Eli: Around 1971, Maartje van Putten was a young mother on an Amsterdam street with a primary school on it. Cars were arriving fast. In 1960, the Netherlands had about 45 cars per thousand people. By 1970, it was about 200. Outside that school, she told a Dutch magazine, children were run over frequently. Her words later: "It was clear that going to school was a huge risk for children."

Mara: And bikes were losing the road. By some estimates, half or more of Amsterdam's trips were made by bike in the 1950s. Around 1970, it was somewhere between a fifth and a third.

Eli: A listener asked about exactly that. Amsterdam was full of cars in the 1970s. What turned it into the bike capital of the world? Today's angle is from child slaughter to cycle haven how a mothers' revolt reclaimed Amsterdam.

Mara: The first push came from parents who'd seen what that traffic did to their kids. Whether parents could make a whole country rebuild its streets around bikes is the fight that follows.

Stop de Kindermoord

Eli: Her street wasn't the only one. In 1971, Dutch road deaths hit a record, about 3,300. Accounts put the children among them at more than 400. That October, near Eindhoven, a six-year-old girl set off for school and was killed in a crash minutes later. Her father, Vic Langenhoff, was a journalist. In September 1972, the day after another of his daughters was driven off the road and survived, he published an article in De Tijd. Its headline: Stop de Kindermoord.

Mara: Stop the Child Murder. Not accidents. Murder. A campaign that meant to act, not just mourn.

Eli: And it did act. He wrote that this was no side issue; it was a question of whether the Dutch wished to be a civilized people. In Amsterdam, a group took up the name, with Maartje van Putten, at 23, as its first president. On 15 December 1972 they occupied the Albert Cuypstraat, blocking traffic to claim room for children to play. Of one early protest she remembered mostly women, a few children, and herself in the middle of a circle. "I'm not sure if we were singing, but very friendly."

Mara: Friendly, with a fight underneath. The road-safety body Veilig Verkeer Nederland said safety meant behaviour: training, helmets, yellow coats, teaching children to look left-right-left.

Eli: That's what she pushed against. "Our key issue was that the street was our common territory, but it had been totally taken over by car traffic." Behaviour mattered, she said, but "the number one thing is infrastructure." The group wanted cycle paths and living streets.

Mara: Which puts the burden on the street's design, not on a six-year-old in a yellow coat.

Eli: Mara, the parents wanted streets rebuilt, and city hall's planners had been drawing very different streets since the 1950s.

The Highway Threat

Mara: Those streets were on paper long before the parents marched. In the 1950s, one plan proposed knocking down parts of the city to make room for traffic. Then the police chief suggested filling in inner-city canals for car rings and parking. The outcry was so loud the council backed away within a week.

Eli: Filling in Amsterdam's canals. That's how far the car argument reached.

Mara: By the early 1970s, the front line was the Nieuwmarkt, an old quarter with a four-lane road planned through it. The council voted that road down, 22 to 21. The money had turned too. In 1972, the Dutch Economic Research Institute estimated what roads for the coming car boom would cost over the rest of the century. Its answer: 15 to 22 billion guilders. Road-building on that scale started to look out of reach.

Eli: So the planners' own future was too expensive to build.

Mara: And Rotterdam shows the other path. After the war, it was rebuilt around wide boulevards and car access to the centre. In one interview about that history, the verdict was blunt: "they made it very difficult and unpleasant to cycle." Rotterdam still cycles much less than Amsterdam, in the same country.

Eli: What actually emptied the roads came from far outside the country.

Ten Quiet Sundays

Mara: In 1973, Arab oil producers cut supplies and embargoed the Netherlands over its support for Israel. Oil prices jumped worldwide.

Eli: The government's answer was car-free Sundays. The first was 4 November 1973: no private motor traffic from 3 a.m. until midnight, under emergency law. In Amsterdam, Le Monde's reporter wrote, cars remained stranded beside canals or along sidewalks. Out on the motorways, it was empty. Children played on them.

Mara: And it came with a message. Prime Minister Joop den Uyl went on television and urged people to adopt a new lifestyle and get serious about saving energy.

Eli: Van Putten took the bans as an opening. On one of those Sundays, she led parents and children by bike from the city centre to Amsterdam North, through the IJ tunnel, which had nothing for cyclists. Some cars were still in it. Police stopped them afterwards and told them it was dangerous. Her words: "We said those days are our days! We take the street back into our hands."

Mara: The Sundays left a mark. After fuel prices spiked, bicycle sales doubled, and shops sold out. One Dutch cycling writer argues the 1973 Sundays "changed something in the Dutch mindset," though the country had tried car-free Sundays before. Cycling started to look like everyday transport again.

Eli: Which is where the argument over the cause begins. For the campaigners, Vic Langenhoff, van Putten and the Stop de Kindermoord foundation, it was outrage over dead children that moved the politicians.

Mara: Eli, the other reading runs through money and energy. Both pressures hit in the same two years, which is why they're so hard to pull apart.

Eli: Van Putten kept the pressure personal. Campaigners cycled with an organ grinder to Den Uyl's house in The Hague to sing for safer streets. They got no further than the hallway, but he came out to hear them. The children talked with him, and he gave them cookies. They presented their song, 'Playing on the streets: a death penalty'. In 1974, families came to the Binnenhof, parliament's home, demanding car-free school routes. About 30 children sang outside while the adults had tea with MPs.

Mara: And the MPs had invited them. She said they really listened.

Eli: By June 1975, nationwide protest rides drew so many people that a long-discussed idea became real. That October, in Utrecht, some 300 to 400 people founded a national cyclists' union, the ENWB, later the Fietsersbond.

Mara: Back on that school street, a few years earlier, she'd been watching children get hit. Now she was singing at the prime minister's door. What nobody knew yet was whether any of it would move a single kerb in Amsterdam.

Eli: Whether Amsterdam's traffic engineers would hand it even one lane was a different fight.

The 1978 Turning Point

Mara: That fight turned in 1978. "1978 was a pivotal point," Marjolein de Lange says. The local elections had become about cycling, and the parties for changing mobility policy won. Afterwards, the Fietsersbond was invited into a bicycle working group with city officials. For activists, a real dilemma: keep protesting, or compromise to get things built. Seventy-five percent voted to cooperate. More than 30 years of working together followed.

Eli: Still putting infrastructure first.

Mara: And the 1978 traffic plan agreed. It gave priority to bike facilities, especially separated cycle tracks, which meant taking road space from cars. Alderman Michael van der Vlis used the union as a source of knowledge. Gradually came parking rules, speed bumps, one-way streets, bike paths and car-free zones.

Eli: Fred Feddes reads the long story differently. In his view, Amsterdam's compact old layout and a cycling habit from before the war meant cars never took hold as completely as in American or British cities.

Mara: Ruth Oldenziel, Marjolein de Lange and others read it the other way: postwar cars were pushing cyclists out, and the city had to build its way back.

Eli: The test was the Berlagebridge. Before 1982, cyclists there rode beside six lanes of busy traffic. The union born in Utrecht, through its Amsterdam cyclists, pressed to turn two of those lanes into cycle paths, and in 1982 the city did. It fit the Main Bicycle Network: linked routes across the city, built to a common cycling standard. The first days brought huge traffic jams. Then most drivers found the new route via the A10 motorway.

Mara: So the cars didn't vanish. They moved to a road built for them.

Eli: Two years later, a proposal wanted the northern bike lane back for cars, with cyclists squeezed onto a narrow lane on the pavement. The union, schools and citizens stopped it. Mara, the lane held; whether that could spread across the whole city was the next fight.

Streets Reclaimed

Mara: It spread rule by rule. Langenhoff had asked whether the Dutch wished to be civilized, and part of the answer was the woonerf: a living street where people on foot and children get the whole space and cars crawl at walking pace. A planner in Emmen devised it, and national rules later gave it legal shape, with through traffic kept out.

Eli: Stop de Kindermoord's living streets, right next to cycle paths, from the start.

Mara: Then towns were allowed 30 km/h zones in residential areas, something the Fietsersbond had campaigned for. And in the early nineties, Amsterdam brought in fiscal parking: street parking charged as a local tax, so free parking ended. Fewer parked cars meant more room, and the revenue went into getting around.

Eli: Koos Louwerse put the logic bluntly: in the end, the best policy for bikes is a policy against cars, about where they can drive and what parking costs.

Mara: And the first CROW design manual for bicycle facilities, a handbook for building them, finally wrote down measures activists had pushed for years. Back to that school street. In 1970, Amsterdam traffic killed 114 people. In recent years, it's been 15 to 20 a year. And the streets slowed down to match. Many residential areas in Amsterdam are traffic-calmed, with a 30 km/h speed limit for cars.

Eli: Bikes took the space. In a 2015 comparison, cycling made up 38 percent of trips in Amsterdam. Across the UK, it was 2 percent.

Mara: Though Amsterdam isn't first at home. In that same comparison, Groningen reached 59 percent.

Eli: So that's what turned Amsterdam: parents who refused to treat dead children as the price of traffic, an oil crisis that emptied the roads and showed another way, and a 1978 council that took lanes and parking from cars and gave them to bikes.

Mara: On that record, taking physical road space from cars looks like the step that reversed the decline. Three signals are still worth watching: whether international rankings put Amsterdam or Copenhagen ahead once track density is weighed against trip share, whether night driving around the 1973 Sundays erased the fuel savings, and how many kerbside parking spaces the city actually removed between 1978 and 1991.

Eli: Look up Stop de Kindermoord.

Mara: And keep following cities with us.

Eli: Thanks for listening. I'm Eli.

Mara: And I'm Mara. Until next time.