Disappearing traffic lights. Removal of motorized traffic from where cyclists and pedestrians needed to be made mass cycling possible in the Netherlands. A second transport revolution despite a rise in car use and ownership.

Assen's first traffic lights were at
this junction, once the most busy in
the city.

The first traffic lights in the world were installed in London in 1868. This gas operated signal exploded shortly after installation.

It wasn't until the 2nd decade of the 20th century that electric traffic lights were invented and after the first of those was installed on August 5th in Cleveland Ohio, they were swiftly adopted worldwide.

The Netherlands followed shortly afterwards, installing the first traffic light in 1928.

Traffic lights were invented for very a reason: The adoption of motor vehicles led to a growing number of deaths and injuries. Controlling motor traffic was essential to improve safety. There are far more cars now than there were a hundred years ago, so they are still needed - but only on streets used by motor vehicles.

Nowadays, the same junction looks
like this. It's still busy with bikes, not
so many cars. The result of deliberate
policy to improve city centres. Note
empty car parking bays. There aren't
many provided but they're rarely full

The first revolution
During the 20th century, not only were traffic lights installed in order to control the problems of motor vehicles, but other changes were made to streets in order to control pedestrians and cyclists.

The transformation of city streets to favour car drivers over cyclists and pedestrians happened across the world. The Netherlands was just like other countries in this regard. Traffic lights were required to avoid motor problems caused by motor vehicles, but those same motor vehicles were still seen as the solution rather than the problem.

Not so long ago, Dutch children were educated about traffic
by "Bruintje Beer in het Verkeer". This junction is just like
the one shown above. Chains stop pedestrians crossing
the road, formal crossings show places where this is allowed,
cyclists are not kept apart from motor vehicles, which appear
to be going rather quickly compared with everyone else.
The text specifically tells children not to cross diagonally,
It's now encouraged by the most modern Dutch traffic light
junction design which make diagonals safe & convenient

Into the 1960s, Dutch towns were actually removing cycle-paths built earlier in order to make more space for cars and in other places the building of cycle-paths was opposed on the grounds of causing delays. For example, in Heerlen, "The head of the traffic police division has declared that the city's traffic situation is leading increasingly to the use of traffic signals at intersections. Should bicycle paths appear at these intersections, this would require separate traffic signals, which would be too costly. Moreover, it would cause too great a delay for 'fast' traffic".

By the 1970s, the streets of Dutch cities had been redesigned with many features associated priotizing motor vehicles:

1. Pedestrian barriers to prevent pedestrians from crossing the road where they want to.
2. Pedestrian crossings to enforce crossing only at places situated for the maximum convenience of drivers
3. Narrow pavements (sidewalks) to make more space available for wide lanes for motor vehicles.
4. Asphalt road surfaces replaced the older tiles to enable higher speeds of driving with lower noise within the car.
5. Traffic lights were required to control mass driving and make it safer, but they were mostly built without much thought to how they could be used to make convenient and safe journeys by foot or by bike,

Another view of how grim Assen had
become by the early 1970s. This street
is no longer open to cars at all. Watch
a video showing how it is now.

The second revolution
Starting in the 1970s, the Netherlands began to transform towns to reduce the problems caused by cars. This resulted in taking a step back from many of the "improvements" made in the mid 20th century, and  returning city centre streets to a similar condition to which they had in the early 20th century. Because cars are either completely banished or have been reduced to mere guests on streets which are dominated by cyclists and pedestrians, the problems that they create have been largely removed from most city centre streets.

Assen in the 1970s. Waiting for a
traffic light which no longer exists

The result of removing motor vehicles from these streets is that the traffic lights and other street features once required to control those vehicles are no longer required and that has made walking and cycling both pleasant and convenient.

Having got rid of the motorized through traffic, the traffic lights could go too. But it couldn't be done without first getting rid of those cars.

City centre streets can be made more civilized, quieter, less fume-filled and more pleasant spaces to be in if motor vehicle access is restricted. Such streets are referred to as Autoluwe or Nearly Car Free. This should not be confused with the far less successful "Shared Space" which seeks to keep motor vehicles in the same spaces.

Another junction in Assen in the 1970s vs. now. Apart from the traffic, note that the photo on the left features the same chains to prevent crossings and narrow pavement (sidewalk) as Bruintje Beer used to educate children about. There is far less traffic and far more space and freedom for pedestrians in the new situation as shown on the right. It's also a lot quieter and the air is cleaner than in the 1960s. Note that the old photo shows a petrol station in the city centre. They were removed from such locations decades ago and can now only be found around the edge of the city.

This is a very small junction
View Larger Map
The junction shown in the video and photos above, the site of the first traffic lights installed in Assen, is very small. With 1950s and 60s methodology (which took hold just as well here in the Netherlands as elsewhere), it made sense to dedicate a small junction like this, with streets barely more than 10 metres wide, to motor vehicles. This was the wrong solution for such a street. The "second revolution" took away that mistake and other places should not seek to replicate the mistake.

Nowadays, if you go looking in the Netherlands for traffic light solutions for streets of these small sizes, you're likely to be disappointed. This blog post shows you the current situation. i.e, it's no longer a traffic light junction. On a map which shows all of the traffic lights of Assen, this junction now shows up as a white space.

Not only in the city centre
With modern infrastructure, you do not usually have to stop for traffic lights with anything like the frequency in the Netherlands that you would do in other countries which still resemble the mid 20th century in this country. This is enormously beneficial for cyclists as you'll see from this video, showing a complete journey from a village outside Assen to the city centre.

At the end of the video there's another glimpse of how the city centre looked in the 1970s

Why stopping matters to cyclists
Stopping a motor vehicle and re-starting it consumes a great deal of energy. However, it's not especially wearing on the driver, who merely has to move their feet between the brake and accelerator pedals. Stopping is much more serious for a cyclist because the cyclist is not merely the "driver" of their vehicle but also the engine. Stopping not only costs a cyclist time but also energy. It greatly reduces average speeds to have to stop, making all journeys take longer and thereby also making an acceptable journey time cover a much smaller area.

For a cyclist, each stop can easily be the equivalent of riding several hundred extra metres. Cycling becomes a far more attractive mode of transport, even over longer distances, once it is made into a much quicker and more convenient mode of transport. This is why Dutch people not only cycle more of their short journeys than people of other nations, but also cover far more of their middle distance and longer journeys by bike than do people of other nations.

When I visited London in November, I expressed my annoyance not only with the danger of cycling in that city but also that cycling is dreadfully slow on the streets of a city which is still designed very much around the motor vehicle (the video that I shot in London shows many of the problems with that city, others are discussed in blog posts). London is by no means unique. Many other cities also combine dreadful cycling provision with time-consuming stop-start journeys. In such an environment we can never expect to see cycling grow beyond a 5% modal share. Even convincing people to make a low proportion of their journeys by bike will be difficult so long as cycling remains both dangerous and inconvenient.

Not only is cycling infrastructure required to removes cyclists from the danger of 'sharing' streets with motor vehicles, but it is also necessary to unravel routes sufficiently that cyclists can reach their destinations without having to continuously stop and restart. Stop-start cycling is also an artifact of motor dominance because it comes from streets being designed around motor vehicles. The solution is not to put cyclists onto back-roads which don't go to their destinations, but to give them direct routes which do take them to their destinations.

Every country followed the first revolution, however most haven't yet begun to catch up with the second revolution which started 40 years ago.

What can we learn?

Study Tours can be organised for groups on
almost any date. The next open tour is in April.
Read more about what we cover.

It is possible to make city centres more attractive for cycling and walking by making these modes more pleasant and more convenient. Removing traffic lights achieves these aims if the traffic is also removed. To see this in real life, book a place on a study tour.

"Nearly Car Free" areas

The Dutch term "autoluwe" refers to any place with few cars. There is no translation in regular use in English but I think we need one. I propose "Nearly Car Free" or NCF or a way of describing these areas. It's perhaps a little cumbersome, but it's descriptive and difficult to distort its meaning.

This "winkelerf" uses the same sign
as a woonerf, but the character of the
street is not like a woonerf. Children
don't play in the streets here. In
practice this works the same as
any autoluwe shopping street.

Woonerven (Home Zones) are Nearly Car Free but woonerven are residential areas. Shopping streets do not have the same character. While woonerven are not through routes by either car or bicycle and serve only those who live in the area, shopping streets have to allow access by the public.  Shopping streets should not have the same form as a residential area. The idea of Autoluwte goes back to the 1970s and it is common in very many town centres and smaller shopping areas across the entire country. Every town and city has areas like this and the centres of Assen and Groningen are not exceptions.

The video shows how this works on a fairly cold February afternoon (min -3 C, max +2 C) in Assen. There are a lot of cyclists and pedestrians but you won't see many moving cars. Many of the pedestrians have reached the centre of the city by bicycle. You can see their bikes parked everywhere in the video. Because there are very few moving cars there are also very few interactions with cars. This results in a high degree of subjective safety and makes it possible for everyone to feel safe when walking or cycling:


In the centre of Assen everyone cycles in safety. If you don't watch this video then you will probably not understand the blog post.
Nearly car-free streets like this feature all across the Netherlands. They're a great success.

Removal of railings

Note that anti-pedestrian chain railings were once installed on streets like this in the Netherlands in order to prevent pedestrians from crossing the road where it was most convenient to do so. They're gone now. Pedestrians can now cross at any point on a street which is no longer designed for the maximum convenience of motor vehicles.

A very common type of street
Almost all city centres in The Netherlands work in this way. Some streets are only for pedestrians, many allow cycling for access, those where automobiles are allowed are usually not useful as through routes.


Groningen also has nearly car free streets. As in Assen, this means that even small children can ride, and crash, their own bikes in the centre of the city, safely isolated from the danger of cars.
This is not "Shared Space"
Unfortunately, foreign observers often confuse NCF with the much newer, but much less successful idea called "Shared Space". This is unfortunate as they are actually diametrically opposed ideas.

"Shared Space" in Haren. Much through
traffic by car, conflict is promoted,
Cycling feels uncomfortable and
is discouraged.

While NCF removes motor vehicles in order to make cycling and walking more pleasant (an example of unravelling of routes), "Shared Space" seeks to achieve the same ends while keeping motor vehicle through traffic and forcing motorists, cyclists and pedestrians to "share" the streets on an equal footing. Simply because architectural features of the space have been changed, drivers are expected to behave in an unusually friendly manner towards pedestrians and cyclists for eternity. Those same architectural features are also supposed to give pedestrians and cyclists more confidence to make their way as vulnerable road users amongst a large volume of motorized traffic.

"Shared Space" in Haren.
It's really all about cars,
not about pedestrians and
cyclists.

This is of course ludicrous and it does not work. The Netherlands was the first to come up with the idea of Shared Space, but it is not popular here now. "Shared Spaces" in this country date from the early 2000s when the idea had its brief popularity and before people had seen the problems with it. They have been retrofitted with features such as pedestrian crossings, railings and signs because of course it turned out they were necessary in order that people would be able to do such things as cross the road.

In "Shared Space" areas, pedestrians run across the road and cyclists cycle amongst the pedestrians. Such areas do not have relaxing and pleasant streets as seen above in Assen and the many other places which have excluded cars.

The most effective way of civilizing town centres is to remove cars from them
Removing cars from streets is a very effective way of encouraging cyclists. However, this removal has to be almost total in order to make cycling attractive to the whole population.

Note also that "pedestrianized" areas in the Netherlands usually make it clear that they do not exclude bicycles.

We are running an open Cycling Study Tour in May 2013. Book a place if you wish to see how what we describe on this blog works in real life.

Well before it was applied to streets in the Netherlands, the underlying principle of Shared Space was laid out very clearly by the Danish author Hans Christian Andersen.

How Groningen grew to be the world's number one cycling city

Groningen in the North of the Netherlands, just 30 km north from where we live, has the highest rate of cycling in the world. Nearly 60% of all journeys are made by bicycle in the city. These three slides from a presentation given on the 2008 study tours and previously at the 2006 European conference on Mobility Management by Mr Cor van der Klaauw.

In 1964 the city was small. There were no restrictions on cars being driven through the centre of the city and there were few main cycle routes. The motorist was king at this time. In some locations in the Netherlands in the 1950s and 1960s, cycle paths were removed in order to make more space for cars.

Urban motorway in Groningen. Some
were built before policy changed.

In Groningen, just as in other cities across the world, the 1960s brought planning and building of motorways right into the city itself (west to east and to the south in the next map).

A few of these large roads were built in Groningen. Notably the motorway which leads from the South and also access to the North, West and East.

However, in 1972 a new local government changed the emphasis of planning in Groningen. The centre of the city was to be considered as the "living room" and town planning was integrated with transport policy. The city was to be designed to be compact.

By 1980 the city had grown considerably with a lot of new housing around the outskirts. There was a ring road around the centre of the city, but access to the centre by car had been reduced. Many more high quality cycle routes had been created.

In 2006 the city has grown rather more, and cars pushed out further from the city centre. The city is now split into four segments between which it is impossible to drive without going out to the ring-road and back in again. There are many more cycle routes than before.

I should note that there is nothing stopping you cycling through the centre these days. The last few minutes of one of my videos shows the centre by bike. However, it isn't designated as a main cycling route. It is impossible to drive through, though, as the only way out by car is the way you came in, and many streets are entirely closed to private cars.

Groningen has 84000 homes, 38% of which were built after 1970. 180000 people live in those homes, and they own 71000 cars and 300000 bicycles. There are 0.4 cars and 1.7 bikes per person.

Seventy eight percent of residents now live within 3 km of the city centre. 90% of employees live within 3 km of the city centre. These short distances of course help to make cycling a viable mode of transport for most journeys,  but we should note that Groningen is actually not particularly densely populated by world standards. In fact, Groningen is far less densely populated than many cities in other countries with less cycling.




There are an average of 1.4 bicycle trips per person per day in the city, making up 59% of the total journeys, vs. under 37% by car. The average speed for driving within the city is 9.6 km/h, the average speed for cycling is 14.2 km/h. The cycling figure may seem slow, but note that it refers to whole journey average speed, not peak speed sprinting between lights. It also reflects the wide demographics of the cyclists. Fast Groningen cyclists travel appreciably quicker than this, but drivers can do little to increase their speed.

It isn't only Groningen which has followed such policies. Most, if not all, Dutch cities have done this to an extent. For instance, Assen also has a car free town centre, as does Nijmegen.

In summary, it is quite possible to grow cycling so that it accounts for more journeys than any other mode within a city. However, it does take a helping hand. Groningen's achievement came from policy to exclude cars from the centre of the city (a form of segregation without cycle paths), and to provide high quality and mostly traffic free cycling routes from the outskirts to the centre.

Also bear in mind that Groningen has the lowest average age of any city in the Netherlands and a high population of students (approximately 50000 in a city of 180000 people). This factor of course also boosts the level of cycling. However, due to the design of the city, even students in Groningen tend to cycle more than students anywhere else.

There are quite a few other posts about Groningen, including the huge railway station cycle park, an extraordinary bridge, how congestion on busy cycle-paths is avoided by providing other routes and how despite all this, the city still didn't manage to win the "Cycling City of the Netherlands" competition in 2011.

See this for yourself and have what you are looking at put in context for you and explained by a native English speaker. Book a study tour.

Are these figures accurate?
Note that it is not entirely clear what the 59% figure for cycling actually means. Who was counted ? Only residents or also people who travel from outside the city ? What methodology led to this result ? Clearly some people are excluded as pedestrians do not appear to have been counted when walking could possibly account for anything up to a fifth of total journeys made in the city (as is the case in Amsterdam) then this would reduce the cycling percentage to around 50% and driving to around 30%. We should always be skeptical of figures which are presented in a promotional way as most figures presented all around the world on cycling are not reliable. Exaggeration of cycling modal shares is extremely common around the whole world. The lowest figure we've seen quoted for Groningen comes from the possibly more authoritative Fietsberaad Cycling in the Netherlands publication. This states that the cycling modal share for Groningen is 38%, though they also don't tell us exactly how they came to that figure.

Read more about Groningen
Groningen's cycling infrastructure isn't always good. In fact, it's often quite inferior to the road infrastructure. Groningen hasn't done enough to enhance the experience of cyclists. Read more about it here.

A visit to Nijmegen

This video has explanatory captions which are only visible when it is viewed on a computer and not on a mobile device

Nijmegen, 160 km south of where we live in Assen, is considered to be the oldest city in the Netherlands. It's a city with many beautiful buildings which celebrated its 2000th year in 2005.

My friend Terry (who visited us last year and features in another post about a bike ride between Assen and Groningen ) lives in Nijmegen and I visited him last Saturday by train, taking along my folding bike.

The free of charge, guarded and secure cycle park that we use is one of five in the city.

Nijmegen has many historic buildings, and much reconstruction was required after the second world war to repair the city. Much of the devastation of the city was the result not of the occupying forces, but of Allied bombers accidentally bombing the city centre on February 22nd 1944.

Many of the older buildings were recreated much as they used to be. However, the shopping centre was rebuilt with wide avenues to take motorised traffic, on the American model. As you'll see from the video, this is not how they have remained.

While the Netherlands is not a hilly country overall, Nijmegen is quite a hilly city. This has not prevented it from having a high rate of cycling.

In 2002, the new government of Nijmegen decided to invest €10M over 4 years in new cycling infrastructure. The population is 161000 so this comes to over €15 per person per year.

Nijmegen was nominated as Fietsstad 2008 (Cycling City 2008) but lost out to Houten.

I also visited Nijmegen back in 2005, and wrote about the bicycle museum. The centre of Nijmegen is, like most city centres, "nearly car free".