Retrofitting sanity to residential streets - Woonerven

Explanatory captions on this video are visible only if you view it on a computer and not on a mobile device.
The Woonerf or "Living Street" is a design for residential streets which puts people first. I've written about streets designed and built specifically as woonerven before, but the streets in this video are different. This time you see some of the many streets in the Netherlands which originate from long before the advent of the woonerf, but into which these principles have been incorporated.

The speed limit is "walking pace", but the main reason that such streets are pleasant to live in is that they simply don't work as through roads so the only vehicles you'll see here are those which belong to people who live in the street. You're not going to make any journey quicker by driving through here instead of on the main road. Note that they're also not through routes by bicycle. A woonerf is for living in. It's not a main route for anyone.

Often, people complain that Dutch solutions to creating a cycling and people friendly street-scape might take too much room. This is a myth. In these examples, much has been achieved in very narrow streets and without re-arranging existing buildings. The important thing is to distinguish between where people live and where suitable places are for through journeys to be made.


A correspondent in the comments wondered about how nice it might be if cars that people owned were parked at the edge of the development and therefore not in the streets where people live. This is difficult to achieve with housing which already exists, but there is an example of a newer (1980s) development in Assen where this was done:

Grotere kaart weergeven
The problem with this is that people like to be able to see their car from their home. Newer developments have not copied this style.

What are streets for ? (part two)

Quite a few people responded to a previous post showing a hopscotch game chalked onto the street outside our home. However, children playing on the street doesn't only happen completely informally here.

This example is a hopscotch game which is built into a road surface, using coloured bricks. It is one of several in the same area.

This area, Peelo in Assen, extensively uses the idea of the woonerf or "home zone". The speed limit on these streets is walking pace, and cyclists and pedestrians have priority over motor vehicles. The woonerven are connected together by roads which have a speed limit of 30 km/h (18 mph) as well as by cycle paths which give the most direct and convenient routes.

This idea was very common in the Netherlands in the late 1970s through to the 1980s when this area of the city were built. Similar thinking can be seen in developments from the early 1970s and in later developments.

A video showing the streets around this area is here:

Explanatory captions on this video are visible only if you view it on a computer and not on a mobile device.
While this estate is now nearly 30 years old, many of the features of it are still not apparent in areas of housing being built in other countries. This area of Assen, as well as newer and older residential areas, features on the Study Tour.

What are streets for ?

This is what the street right outside our home looks like this evening. The local children have been playing hopscotch. Anyone on the way in or out by bike or in a car has to take care around the children. No parental supervision is needed.

Sometimes the chalk paths and buildings made by the local children stretch all the way down our street and around the corner into the next. Children ride back and forth on a variety of different devices, or run up and down.

Ball games are also encouraged by a goal on the green outside our home. No injuries, damage to property or car crashes have been reported as a result.

Our home is in the middle of the google maps image. You'll see how these houses are built around a small green with a little playing equipment. The message is quite clear. The street is not merely a space for cars, it's a space for children to play. For people to socialise.

On New Year's Eve, one of the neighbours put up a tent so all could get together and socialise in this space.

This is a quite typical example of planning of a residential area in the Netherlands in the early 1970s (our home was built in 1972). The same principles are still applied, with the same results.

A later blog post shows an example of a hopscotch game built permanently into a road in a residential area.

A Cul-De-Sac ? Isn't that "bad" ?
Like everywhere else in Assen, and indeed across the nation, whether cul-de-sac like this or another street design, all residential streets are connected to the finely spaced grid of very high quality cycle-routes which cover the Netherlands. There are two high quality cycle-paths, both four metres wide, within 200 m of our home. These take us to every destination. There is no single design of residential street which discourages cycling and walking, it's the lack of a decent network of cycling facilities and the lack of subjective safety on the roads which do exist that cause the problem.

Both areas feature on the Study Tours that we organise in Assen.

Old British Street Signs included the possibility of a "Play Street", a woonerf like concept

Some time ago while looking through an old set of encyclopaedias when I found some pictures of road signs.

Two of the interesting signs are shown above.

I've never in my life seen a "play street" sign in the UK, and these days the country seems to have great difficulty in putting up 20 mph speed limit signs, let alone 15 mph signs. However, both of these things were apparently possible in when my old encyclopaedia was printed back in 1959.

The same encyclopaedia also includes the following passage:

"Road Safety
A motor-car, motor-cycle or any other mechnically-propelled vehicle is a lethal instrument ... A great deal of fun has been made of the man with the red flag who walked in front of the early cars ; yet the authorities of those days had the common sense to foresee, however dimly, the consequences of letting mechnically-propelled vehicles loose on the public highway."
...
"The general mixture of cars, motor-cycles, pedal cycles, and pedestrians has resulted in a toll of death, bereavement, and maiming that is horrible to contemplate and that constitutes a shame and a disgrace to 20th-century civilisation. It is a disgrace because most accidents are avoidable. Mechanical causes (like the failure of the steering gear) are nowadays rare. Bad weather, especially fog and icy roads, can at any time be dangerous. But the great majority of accidents occur because someone has forgotten the basic fact with which this article began - that a mechnically -propelled vehicle is a lethal weapon."
...
Growing accident rate
There were, of course, accidents in the days when all or most vehicles were horse-drawn, but the real slaughter did not begin until 1919, with the great development of motor transport after the First World War. No road-accident figures were published until 1909 ; and it was not until 1930 that the reporting to the police of such accidents became compulsory. For the ten years from 1929 to 1938 the casualties on the roads of England and Wales were:

Killed: 68,548
Injured: 2,107,964
Pedestrians Killed: 33,319
Pedestrians Injured: 760,472


And here ?

Of course, over here you quite commonly find the equivalent of both of the signs above, in the form of the woonerf sign which is very common in housing developments and the 30 km/h (18 mph) sign which is to be seen at the edge of all residential areas.

The blue sign shown here is that which you find in a woonerf, or in English "living street". This is the modern equivalent of a play street, and the sign shows kids playing as being larger, and more important, than cars. There is a video showing streets built along these lines.

Update: Anneke in her response to this item tells me that the speed limit in a woonerf is "walking pace." i.e. about 5 km/h

2011 update: In 2010 there was some confusion about this in the comments (below). People were quite insistent that "play street" was just a place-holder name or a concept that was never built and that they never actually existed and for a little while I wondered that as well. However, then TH posted some very compelling evidence that the post was correct in the first place. Click on the photo for more information:

Cycling with children can be made easier and more convenient

The road sign pictures at the top are taken from "The Book of Knowledge" sixth edition printed in 1959. The photo of children on a play street came from the londonplay website. While play street signs are not easy to find in the UK now, woonerf signs are very easy to find. The woonerf sign came from a signpost just around the corner. There are many of them all around the Netherlands.