Going Dutch? Government policies can shape culture and damaging decisions can be unmade

In 2006, I first visited the Dutch city of Utrecht. I had arranged to meet a friend outside Utrecht Centraal station on the Catharijnesingel. Although my grasp of Dutch was fairly rudimentary, I did know that a singel was a canal and envisioned (this being before the days of Google Street View) a charming waterway flanked by trees and cyclists.

To my surprise, I was greeted by eight lanes of busy motorway separating two rows of concrete buildings, as if a section of the M50 had been dropped on Amiens Street. A few hundred metres distant, several lanes dipped below ground level and it was possible to see the course of the former canal, now covered in concrete and bitumen.

One of the few things more quintessentially Dutch than canals is cycling. Queens Juliana and Beatrix were keen cyclists, and prime minister Mark Rutte commutes by bike. Dutch ambassador Adriaan Palm is frequently photographed on two wheels during visits to Irish towns. So why was this canal in cycle-friendly Netherlands drained and filled with cars?

In the 1960s, a booming economy led to a large increase in car ownership. Cars soon dominated Dutch city centres; streets were choked with motor vehicles and cathedral squares were turned into open-air car parks. In Utrecht, the city’s central location in the Netherlands made it an obvious site for a retail destination that could attract clientele from across the country, and so city planners and developers worked together to design a driver-friendly solution. The result was Hoog Catharijne, Europe’s largest shopping centre, with Utrecht’s first parking garage built adjacent to it and motorway access achieved by draining the Catharijnesingel.

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I visited Utrecht again briefly in both 2007 and 2008, and little had changed. But when I returned in 2019, I walked out of the train station into a modern civic plaza surrounded by shops and restaurants. When I got to the Catharijnesingel I discovered that it was once again a waterway, and I spotted a small boat rowing past a monumental whale crafted from plastic fished out of the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii.

A seemingly endless stream of cyclists flowed along Vredenburg, the adjacent street that links the city centre and the railway station with its bicycle park, which at 12,500 spaces is the world’s largest. Some 33,000 bicycle journeys are made on that route every day, out of 125,000 in total across the city, which has a municipal population of about 350,000.

This dramatic and very pleasant change was due to three main factors: societal pressure from grassroots organisations, central government responding to external pressure by promoting a cycling culture, and local government working in a co-ordinated manner with other stakeholders to correct past mistakes. In the 1960s, narrow Dutch streets were overflowing with traffic and accidents soared. By 1971, there were 3,300 road traffic deaths, 400 of them children.

In 1973, the pressure group Stop de Kindermoord (“Stop Infanticide”) was established to campaign against vehicular traffic and associated accidents. In 1975, it was followed by the Fietserbond, or cyclists’ union, which represented the views of cyclists in planning and policy decisions.

1973 also saw an oil crisis, with prices trebling. Joop den Uyl’s coalition government used the opportunity to promote cycling as a healthy, inexpensive and low-energy means of transport. Cars were banned from city centres on Sundays to save petrol and the Government began funding Stop de Kindermoord. By 1978, cycling culture was so well organised and widely supported that it played a decisive role in local elections. City governments scrambled to provide safe cycling infrastructure, with dedicated cycling routes growing from 9,000km in 1975 to 30,000km by 2014 and cycling fatalities declining by 67 per cent.

In Utrecht, popular support for draining the Catharaijnesingle had always been lukewarm. The opening of Hoog Catharijne in 1973 was accompanied by extensive protests. By the 1980s the local Government decided the development had not been successful and explored options to undo the damage. Work started in 2007 and by 2020 big construction was complete, with cars banned from several streets and the Catharijnesingel returned to its former glory. This month, Utrecht celebrates its 900th anniversary of city status with, appropriately, the starting stage of the Vuelta a España.

Stuart Mathieson is a postdoctoral fellow in the School of History and Geography at Dublin City University