What Ireland can learn from Dutch street design

For centuries, streets used to be a place to be with each other, to live, talk, trade, play and move around. Only in the past century has it become a space for traffic: a place to drive through and away from as quickly and efficiently as possible. People on the street have become subordinate to the car. Most people don’t realise this, because we all became used to thinking about the street in traffic logic. For example: we say a street is ‘closed’ for a fair or an athletic event. Closed, for whom? For motorists. But actually, the street is open for people.

Here’s another example: we talk about ‘vulnerable road users’. But they have been made vulnerable by heavy and fast traffic. Why don’t we call those fast, heavy traffic participants ‘dangerous road users’?

Cars have been in our streets for over a hundred years now, but traffic logic took over the streets in Europe only in the 1950s and ‘60s. This didn’t happen just like that. Through the postwar Marshall Plan, Dutch engineers were paid by Americans to attend events of the International Road Federation (IRF), Irish engineers in the 1960s also obtained fellowships from the IRF. This sounds neutral, but the IRF was a union founded in 1948 - the same year as the Marshall Plan started - by a number of oil companies, the association of American car manufacturers and car tyre makers.

From the IRF, European engineers learned about the profession of the traffic engineer, and this is how we got traffic engineers here too. Their logic became decisive in thinking about the street. It gave us the street design we now find normal - with pedestrian crossings, traffic lights and lines everywhere on the road. Children who had previously just played in the streets were pushed into their own space, in playgrounds. With cars being allowed to dominate the street all of this became a necessity. Nowadays, traffic engineers are often the only professional group that municipalities ask to sit around the table when it comes to the design of a street or a neighbourhood. And yet people do or could do much more here than drive a car.

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The fact that the Netherlands have 37,000 km of cycle path is thanks to a popular uprising, led by groups like Provo (short for Provocation), the ENWB (acronym for the First, Only, Honest or Real Dutch Cycling Association) and STOP the Child Murder, which rebelled against the car in the 1970s with their white bike plan, the ringing of the prime minister’s doorbell and pretending to lie dead on the street. They reclaimed space for the cyclist and the ordinary walker.

These clubs were professionally organised and found a wide audience in all walks of life. They then changed from action groups into discussion partners who thought along and collaborated on the new layout of the cities and the country. This is how the Dutch got their relatively human-friendly residential areas and the most finely-meshed network of cycle paths in the world, which, as an unexpected side effect, makes the Netherlands also one of the best countries to drive a car. It has shaped our country, quite literally, even beyond the bike paths. Thanks to the bicycle, we can more easily take the train and thanks to the train, we can cycle more easily. And that combination in turn shapes our urban layout.

In the 1970s, the Dutch transport economist Geurt Hupkes conducted research into how often, how far and at what speed people move around the world every day. He discovered: whether they lived in Peru or in Singapore, in the Netherlands or in the Soviet Union, and whether they had a car, a bicycle or only a footpath: the majority of people always turned out to spend 70 to 80 minutes a day on the road, if you add up all the trips to friends and family, to work and to the store. This is called the travel time constant.

Because travel time is constant, if we build a new stretch of freeway, it will not save time, but will make us cover more distance. Around new infrastructure people will start building new houses, offices and venues, located at greater distances. As a result, your work and your family are often no longer within walking or cycling distance, as they were before the 1950s.

For many people in the world, even the supermarket is no longer within walking distance, and it is too dangerous to walk there with all that car traffic. And so you have to take the car to do that, too, and that’s why the traffic jams are coming back.

Why do we keep building highways anyway, even though we’ve known the time travel constant for decades? Because we use traffic models, which predict at what point in the future freeways will become congested. These models now govern the political decisions and seem neutral. But they aren’t: political choices are solidified in those models, such as the idea of minimising travel time losses. Which also means travelling is seen as something of negative value.

Politicians leave decisions about the street, including those about life or death, to the models of technical professionals. Moral choices, such as whether or not to increase a speed limit or what kind of schoolyard you want, are converted into risk calculations. As a result, no one currently bears the political responsibility for the human costs of our mobility system. And these are very large. Consider, for example, the long-term impact that many traffic crashes have on a large circle of people involved.

As a society, we have become dependent on a mobility system that is geared to maximising traffic flow, which can only be achieved by designing our streets and land for machines. We think we accept that as a society. But many people want it to be different. That starts with breaking free from traffic logic.

How to escape the assumption that everything must be designed solely to get from A to B as quickly and efficiently as possible? Many professionals and citizens are trying to figure this out, for example by focusing on the independence of children, equality, health and happiness. They are learning how we can start to see mobility as something that belongs to ourselves again, instead of a service provided by companies.

In the last few decades, the Dutch have become world famous for their segregated bicycle lanes, which very much benefit both motorists and cyclists. But they also are a product of traffic engineering, segregating people safely along their modes of transport rather than creating a shared public space that can be used by society for a variety of possible uses.

And maybe that is the most valuable lesson to learn from the Netherlands: mobility is much more than just a technical problem for which engineers devise solutions. It is something political, which we ourselves can help shape.

Thalia Verkade and Marco te Brömmelstroet are the authors of Movement: how to take back our streets and transform our lives, published on June 2nd by Scribe UK