It’s a common contention. We love our cars too much. We can hardly bear to be apart from them. We don’t want streets which prioritise pedestrians, or people who ride bicycles. We visit Europe and marvel at their mixed-use streets, ubiquitous transit, and the mysterious concept of woonerf*, and all those bicycles. Then we come home and say, “Of course, it can’t be done here.”
Surprisingly, places like Amsterdam, Copenhagen and Barcelona weren’t always a pedestrian and cyclist Utopia. Back in the 1960s traffic was as bad as anywhere else. Cities frequently ground to a halt. In The Netherlands there was even worse.
By the early ’70s 450 child bikeped deaths and over 3200 total annually were too much. This carnage led to the “Stop de Kindermoord” campaign. Over decades, reforms stimulated by the protests made Amsterdam and the Netherlands into a road sharing mecca.
*Woonerf: A woonerf (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈʋoːnɛr(ə)f]) is a living street, as originally implemented in the Netherlands and subsequently in Flanders (Belgium). Techniques include shared space, traffic calming, and low speed limits.
