Traffic Calming is Everywhere in the Netherlands

Watch this video ad-free on Nebula: https://nebula.tv/videos/not-just-bikes-traffic-calming-is-everywhere-in-the-netherlands

The most amazing thing about traffic calming in the Netherlands is just how ubiquitous it is. From city centre to suburb, from large city to small village, traffic calming is everywhere in the Netherlands.

Sign up to Nebula and watch ad-free and sponsor-free: https://go.nebula.tv/notjustbikes

Patreon: https://patreon.com/notjustbikes
Twitter: https://twitter.com/notjustbikes
Reddit: https://reddit.com/r/notjustbikes
One-time donations: https://notjustbikes.com/donate

NJB Live (my bicycle livestream channel):
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9v57F4xz46KaDsvWfCv8yw

—
Level of Service animation:
https://www.parleyseis.com/

Sustainable Saftey:
https://sustainablesafety.nl/
https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duurzaam_Veilig

Traffic Calming Strategies images from:

Traffic Calming Strategies

[bicycle bell] Traffic calming in the Netherlands is a huge topic, whole books have been written about it. Like this one: But to me, Dutch traffic calming isn’t just about the techniques that are used. That’s interesting, but it’s almost secondary. What’s really remarkable about the Netherlands is that traffic calming is everywhere.

Where I’ve lived in Canada, and in the U.S., traffic calming is only applied if there’s enough demand for it. If enough people have died at a specific location or enough people complain about it long enough, then traffic calming might be considered. For example, Toronto has this convoluted warrant system

Through which you need to prove that traffic calming is truly required and won’t put too much of a burden on those poor drivers. Even after all this process, traffic calming in Canada is extremely minimal. Yes, this street is traffic calmed. Somebody went through that whole warrants nonsense to get this:

Last summer, I was visiting the neighborhood where I grew up and saw this: The first sign says: “Traffic calmed neighborhood”, the second sign says: “50 kph speed limit”. Like, seriously? This two-way residential road is 10 meters wide and the quote “traffic calming” is nothing but a few speed bumps. There’s no one-way streets,

Raised crossings, continuous sidewalks, rough road surfaces, narrow lanes, chicanes, street cuts, or anything else. This tells you all you need to know about traffic calming in Canada. Compare that to the Netherlands, where traffic calming is baked into the National Road safety guidelines. It doesn’t matter if you’re in a major city,

Or in a village. If you’re near the city center, or in a suburb. All streets are required to follow the same national guidelines. It’s still possible to find streets that are not traffic calmed, but that will usually only happen if the street hasn’t had a redesign in the past few decades.

When major construction work is done, a street will be brought up to the latest design standards. Traffic calming included. Consider this crossing: here an arterial road meets a crossing with two minor residential streets. The two streets are cut, so that cars cannot go from one to the other, but cycling

Between the two is still permitted. On the road the lanes are narrowed by the introduction of a median and visual cues showing that there is a crossing. And of course, there’s a continuous sidewalk and cycle path on both sides of the street. This street is in Ermelo, a village of 27,000 people,

And this single crossing in Ermelo probably has more traffic calming than just about any street in Canada, and likely the U.S. too. These big differences in street design come from the drastically different approaches taken by these countries. In the U.S. and in Canada, streets and roads are judged on level of service.

Each street is assessed primarily by its capacity to carry cars. In the U.S., a grade is applied from A through F, depending on how smoothly traffic flows on the street. Traffic calming can work against this goal, so it will only be permitted, if it does not significantly affect level of service.

This is why streets in the U.S. and Canada look like highways, even in city centers. In the Netherlands, a very different approach is taken. In the 1990s a policy called “sustainable safety” was introduced, which is interesting and deserves its own video at some point. One of the assumptions of sustainable safety is

That humans will make mistakes, so the road itself is designed to protect people and be consistent, to make it easier to do the right thing. A local access road is designed, so that most people will naturally drive the speed limit, slow down at crossings, and be aware of other road users,

Without being explicitly told to do so. This consistent road safety approach makes a huge difference for traveling around the Netherlands. Unlike in Canada, I know that just about wherever I go in the country, I will never have a problem crossing the street, I will never feel worried being outside of a car,

And it will never be anxious to walk somewhere, and I’m a lot less concerned about my kids being out in the street as well. Traffic calming can get very technical, so it’s easy to get bogged down in the details. But a consistent, safety first approach to road design

Can make a measurable difference to how it feels to walk, or to cycle around the city. And for our family that ultimately means a better quality of life here in the Netherlands.