The school run in Assen. Two thirds of children cycle to school in this suburb because it was designed specifically to make that possible

It's quite well known that Dutch children cycle to school and it's increasingly well known that the freedom of Dutch children is a good part of why they have such good well-being.

The infrastructure which makes it possible for Dutch children to have freedom in safe conditions didn't appear by chance. It is in large part the direct result of campaigning by Dutch parents for better conditions for their children.

The same type of campaigning could also pay dividends elsewhere. This is why we have started the Campaign for Childhood Freedom (link removed as this unfortunately did not achieve any traction). It's not a "cycling" campaign. While adult cyclists elsewhere would stand to gain much by building of infrastructure as exists in The Netherlands, this campaign is not aimed at adult cyclists. It's quite important to make this distinction.

This is for children. Everyones' children. Everyones' children deserve the same advantages that Dutch children already have. Every parent wants their child to be safe, to be able to develop socially, to have friends, to be healthy. All these things are enhanced by the building of an environment in which children can walk and cycle in safety.

Independent travel is a large part of what makes Dutch children so happy. Note that riding is usually social and side-by-side.

There's no conflict between pedestrians and cyclists because those who have a shorter distance to travel and walk have separated paths for walking while those who ride a bike have a cycle-path of sufficient width that it's possible for friends to ride together or a mother to give her child a little help. This cycle-path is 3.5 metres wide - wide enough for side-by-side cycling in both directions at once.

Being independent from a young age is valuable to any child. Surely all adults remember having fun when their parents were not around.

Bicycles allow children to make relatively long journeys with their friends and without needing their parents to accompany them.

The average age for a child to go independently to school is 8.6 years. It is a sign of how healthy cycling is in this area that it is very rare to see a cargo bike or bakfiets used to transport even very young children. Conditions here are safe enough for children to ride their own bikes rather than be transported on their parents' bikes. Parents carry children on their own bikes for much the same reason as they drive children in cars. i.e. in an attempt to keep them safe where the infrastructure doesn't do a good enough job.

Bikes parked at a secondary school waiting to be released at the end of the day.

The extent to which Dutch children travel independently is quite extraordinary. On average across the whole country they go to school and back unaccompanied from the age of 8.6.

Primary schools are many and their catchment areas are very small. As a result, almost all children either walk or cycle. Those who live closest to the school will walk, but 49% of primary school (age 5-11) children go to school by bike.

Secondary schools (age 12 upwards) are spaced further apart. In this area of The Netherlands there are no secondary schools in the villages so it is normal for children from the age of 12 to cycle up to 40 km a day in order to get to and from school.

In this part of the country a somewhat higher ratio than average of primary school children cycle (see section below) and more than 90% of secondary school aged children cycle to school. Not that it does not stop in our cold winters.

Update Monday 9 September
The photos and video above were taken in Kloosterveen, the newest suburb of Assen. This is an excerpt from the cycling plans for the city from 2006:

The entire document in Dutch is downloadable from our website.

Kloosterveen was planned from the beginning for a high rate of cycle usage. It was expected that there would be 86 cycle trips per day made for every 100 residents. Primary school children were not included in this figure but were considered separately. Primary school children were expected to make up 10 to 12% of the total population and planners expected two thirds of them to go to school by bike. The remaining 1/3 are those who live close enough to the primary school that they are more likely to walk.

By the time this suburb had a population of 6000 people, 1800 bicycle trips were made per day by primary school children in addition to the 5200 other bicycle trips per day made by everyone else. That's a total of 7000 trips per day by bicycle by 6000 people. For the whole population including primary school children that adds up to 116 trips by bicycle per day per 100 residents. It was also estimated that about 10% more trips per day could be counted if people from elsewhere riding through the suburb were included. I was doing this when I shot the video. The suburb can be used as a through route by bicycle but not by car.

This suburb is expected to eventually grow to accommodate 15000 people and the intention of the planners is that by that time there will be 17500 cycle journeys per day - the expected total of residents, primary school children counted separately and cyclists from elsewhere passing through.

Cycle trips per 100 residents per day. Commuting: 13, business trips: 4, shopping: 21, education (excluding primary education): 14, visits/social: 10, recreational and other: 24. These numbers exclude the vast number of primary school children riding bikes and people from elsewhere who ride through Kloosterveen on their journeys.

Also see the design of the shopping centre of this suburb, a route into the suburb which can be used by bikes and buses but not by car or the direct route provided to the city centre, designed to attract people from their cars, and other posts about Kloosterveen.

It should be noted that there are roughly 50 other developments like this under construction across The Netherlands and all follow similar principles. Residential areas designed as long ago as the 1970s had similar aims and older residential areas have also been transformed to allow only bicycles to use them as through routes. As a result, usage patterns, including how frequently children cycle to school, are very similar in older areas to newer suburbs like Kloosterveen.

The moped 'menace'
Much is often written about the nuisance of mopeds in the Netherlands. However, their numbers are usually vastly overestimated. While this suburb has 116 trips per day by bicycle for every 100 residents, there are just 3 trips per day by moped. 2.6%.

Judy took the photos during last week's study tour. The video resulted from my accidentally turning towards the school during a lunchtime ride this week. Normally I'd take a different route at this time of day. There are many choices.

There's an interesting blog post at Kennington People on Bikes which provides a London based counterpoint this this blog post. In Vauxhall, they're planning for no children at all to cycle to school. The post features additional photos of children cycling to school in Kloosterveen, taking by Charlie during the Study Tour two weeks ago.

Pedestrianization without adverse effects for cyclists

Explanatory captions on this video are visible only if you play the video on a computer and not on a mobile device.

It may seem surprising to some, but these photos and video show a pedestrianized area in the Netherlands. It's in the shopping and social centre of a brand-new housing development on the outskirts of Assen. Cyclists are allowed. The signs say so.

These are not old buildings in an old city centre. Everything you see here was built in 2009 and 2010. The official opening was in December of 2010. Shortly before, this was farm land.

It's a very child friendly place. Children can be seen in the video running amok in front of a delivery van, which has to move at a very slow speed as a result. They also ride on various small-scale human powered vehicles in the shopping streets. This suburb was designed to enable 2/3rds of primary school children to cycle to school.

Everyone knows that pedestrians come first here, and behaviour is according to this principle. But note that the design is according to this principle as well.

Cyclists are allowed to cycle all the way through the pedestrianized zone, and ample cycle parking is provided outside all the shops to encourage cyclists.

However, this is not a through route for cyclists. Cyclists whose destination is elsewhere, and who wish to get wherever they are going faster, will take other more convenient, faster routes rather than riding through here. This is important as it makes no sense at all to have a pedestrianized area which is also a major through route for cyclists.

What's more, it's actually unusual to see a van being driven in this location. A delivery only road built behind the shops serves for most deliveries.

You can see the main route from the centre of this city to the centre of this housing development in a previous blog post. Another post shows part of the route in the opposite direction.

You may be wondering what happens should you want to drive here ? Well, actually you can do that too. This whole place is in fact built on top of an underground car park. Residents living in apartments here not only have the legally required secure bicycle parking, but also have have allocated secure car parking under the development. Visitors to the shops can also drive.

Aerial photograph from 2007.
No permanent buildings yet in the
centre, but many facilities were
provided as temporary buildings.

Car parking here is free of charge. It often is so in the Netherlands, a country which is not "anti-car" as some cycling advocates imagine it must be. Should we ever want to buy a large item here which could not easily be transported by bike, there would be no problem with driving to these shops. However, we probably never will do this. Cycling is too convenient.

Free indoor car park. It never fills up.

The only driving route from our home to this place (in blue) has two sets of traffic lights on it and three roundabouts. It starts off by heading in the wrong direction, and the distance is significantly further than any of the many plausible routes by bike (some shown in red). Additionally, if we cycle then we can park our bikes directly outside the shops. A car would be buried somewhere underneath and involve a few minutes walk to the shops:

If it were not possible to park your bike immediately outside the shops, and if bikes had to be placed in the same underground car-park as cars, then this would make the car much more competitive in terms of time. Perhaps it could even be quicker than cycling if you were lucky at the traffic lights.

This is why in order for pedestrianization not to favour the car over the bike, it has to accommodate cyclists very well. That's exactly what we see here. The sign shows that it's a pedestrian area, but underneath it says "cycling allowed". A nice simple message, and an essential one. Take away easy access by cyclists and you actually create a car-oriented pedestrianized area which promotes driving over cycling. I've seen that before,  more than once.

Free indoor cycle-park at a school in
the complex. Overflowing.

This new centre provides not only a range of shops (supermarkets, baker, toy shop, stationery, flower shop, chemist, hair-dresser, opticians etc.), but also primary schools, adult education facilities, a sport hall, cafes and restaurants, a public library, a town hall, health and fitness centre, medical centre. It's a proper centre for the community. And of course all these things are convenient to cycle to.

As the whole area is not yet complete, this temporary cycle path (3.5 metres wide, smooth asphalt) provides access for people who live north of the centre:


Before any of the above was built
People lived in Kloosterveen for several years before the shopping centre shown above was built. During this time there were temporary facilities provided on the edge of the site now covered by the new central development:

Temporary car-parking by temporary supermarket, chemist, post office and snack bar

Temporary cycle-path leading directly to the cycle-parking in front of the temporary supermarket

By the provision of temporary shops, people were allowed to form the habit of shopping locally rather than arranging their lives around making longer journeys in order to go shopping.

If I show something old, someone always says "but you couldn't do if it were new". If on the other hand, I show something new like this, someone always says "but you couldn't do it if it were old". However, the city centre of Assen also provides an excellent example of somewhere which is both pedestrian and cycle friendly, and Assen is 750 years old. Where there is a will to do so, cyclists can be accommodated well anywhere. Policy in Assen prefers cycling, so we get cycling. If you do what works then mass cycling is possible anywhere.

I published this a bit earlier than originally planned after hearing about troubles with pedestrianization in Canada.

The centre which is the subject of this post has its own website.

Bus and bike access only. Don't bring your car.

Bus-road on the left, cycle-path on the right. There is no conflict between cyclists and buses. Also no conflict with car drivers on this route.

The new housing area of Kloosterveen on the edge of Assen has not yet been completed, however most of the transport infrastructure is in place. This photo shows the route from the western edge of the development into the countryside. It is for cyclists and bus passengers only. The cycle path is on the right in this photo and the bus lane (one bus in width, but for bidirectional use) is on the left. Note that while the bus road is not heavily used - there are only buses every few minutes - cyclists are not expected to share space with the buses. This would lead to conflict between cyclists and bus drivers, and a reduction in subjective safety for cyclists.

The sign makes it quite obvious what will happen to a normal car being driven over this obstacle, as does a close look at the second photo.

There are more routes out of the city by bike than by car, which is part of what makes cycling such an attractive option.

This is the cycle path you eventually end up on if you follow the route from the city centre to the new housing estate and keep on riding out the other side.

Earlier I featured another example of a bus road next to a cycle path, and posted about the lack of fears that cyclists have about buses in an environment where cyclists and buses only very rarely mix. There are also other integrated transport posts which might also be of interest.

A "superhighway" out of Assen

When a new suburb was built on the edge of Assen, the new residents would be living 3.5 to 4.5 km from the centre of the city. Many may have been put off cycling into the city if the route was not of adequate quality, offering enough safety and directness.

There are many examples of where Dutch cyclists get to dodge traffic lights.

The planners came up with a great solution. The most direct route from the city centre to the new development was to be by bike. That's the red line on the map. The driving route is in blue. The red line takes in no traffic lights, and is as cycled in the video above. The blue line has three sets of traffic lights on the route as well as a couple of roundabouts. It's also a bit longer.

Much of the distance covered in the video, and shown on the map, is on road. However, these are "bicycle roads" on which driving is made awkward due to restrictions. Residents can use the road for access to their homes, but it's of no use for a through journey as there are no "destinations" on the road. Motorists are expected to give way to cyclists. They are not supposed to park on the road (residents parking is provided alongside). For cyclists, though, it's wonderful. Direct. Pleasant. Car free (well, very nearly).
When the work was being planned a couple of years ago, the local government made some very amusing cartoon versions of what it would eventually look like, including details of the four new (and one reconditioned - subject of a future post) bridges that would have to be built along here to help cyclists or to relieve motor traffic from this route.

I showed another part of the route in a video a few days ago. That video was shot from the hill which is where the yellow dot is on the map above. Also, there's a view of the last part of the road heading into the city centre, and a view of the rush hour at one point on the road. All three of those videos show a lot more cyclists than the one here, shot on a quiet Sunday morning to show you the infrastructure - which is really the star of the video. Also, the blue bridge featured in a piece about how cycling should not be an extreme sport.

Since the building of the new development, the cycling rate in Assen has risen, not fallen. 41% of all journeys in the city are now by bike.

I had to edit the Google Maps image to get the red line on. Here's a link to it without. The bike I'm riding is the marvellous Sinner Mango velomobile.

The schools are starting again

A few weeks before the start of the school term, banners and signs appear to remind drivers that children are to be expected to be on bikes in larger numbers again. The banner reads "The schools are starting again".

Inside the heart symbols it reads "drive with your heart".

Virtually all school children travel by bike in the Netherlands.

I have previous posts about cycle parking at schools, including videos of primary and secondary age children travelling to and from school, the extent of cycle parking at schools, and about school trips, all tagged with school travel.

The school are already back here. Below are a few photos of the school run at the same school where I made this video:

It's safe for all ages because what looks like a road in these photos is actually a cycle-path from which motor vehicles are excluded.

Primary (elementary) school cycle parking. Children overwhelmingly ride their own bicycles.

Primary (elementary) school cycle parking

Bakfietsen are used only to transport some of the very youngest children. Others ride their own bikes.

Trying to reduce car usage by restricting residential car parking

Street scene in a new British development

I was delighted to hear on the TV a few weeks ago that Essex in the UK has realised the folly of trying to reduce the usage of cars simply by reducing the availability of spaces to park them in new residential areas.

It has been policy in the UK for many years now to provide inadequate space for cars to be parked with the idea that this will somehow result in fewer people owning and using cars.

Cars cars cars, in the way because people have not been provided with enough space to park.

The result has been a mess in new developments, such as that shown here: "The Quills" in Histon, near Cambridge where we used to live. This seemed also to be pretty much the pattern for other new developments in the area.

And yet more cars even on corners. Residents are given no reason to cycle, but also nowhere to put their car

I took these three photos a couple of years ago when we lived in Cambridge. This housing development was not yet finished, and not all houses were occupied, yet the pavements (sidewalks) were already covered in cars. The route out of this estate by bicycle is the same as the car route, and rather drag-strip like.

I was astonished then that people would buy a house in such an area and I'm still astonished. These places are made ugly by the presence of cars and everyone who lives here and owns a car has stress added to their lives because of the difficulty of parking the car.

Dutch residential parking

Dutch street scene: Design to encourage cycling. Car parking is given separate space. In addition to these spaces, these homes also have garages and extra parking at the rear.

By way of contrast, here are three photos of how new Dutch housing areas look, taking as an example the nearest new housing estate to our home in Assen. This isn't an exceptionally cycle friendly design, but rather what is now quite standard in the Netherlands. It's not a new thing, but more or less what has been normal for over twenty years.

By bike you have more routes and more direct routes than by car with routes for cars and for bikes unravelled from one another. As a result of this and the presence of many cycle-paths, cycling is an attractive alternative to driving.

Note the wide cycle paths. Also that there is adequate car parking for the cars owned by the population. Drivers are not left "fighting" over an inadequate number of car spaces.

No-one parks their car on the pavement or on the cycle path. There's no need to do so. As a result, neighbourhood conflict due to parking is very uncommon and of course cycling or walking through this area is easy.

No need to obscure the cycle-path when there is ample room to park elsewhere. Concrete setts built into the grass provide hard standing for additional visitors' cars. The house also has parking at the rear for residents' vehicles. The cycle-path is over 3 metres wide. In addition there is a separate 2 metre wide pavement (sidewalk)

It's pleasant to cycle through residential areas in the Netherlands because they are not dominated by cars.

The design encourages cycling by positive steps, not by trying to make owning a car unpleasant.

That's the difference in attitude:

• Focus on making cycling pleasant, safe and direct as has been done in the Netherlands and it has a chance of becoming popular.
• Focus instead on making conditions bad for driving and you'll simply end up with grumpy drivers.

Car ownership in the UK used to be lower than that of the Netherlands. Now it's the other way around.

Carrot or stick ?

More about Kloosterveen
Read more posts about this new Dutch suburb. Not only does it cater for peoples' private cars, but it is also a place where 2/3rds of primary school children cycle to school as well as virtually all older children. The shopping centre prioritizes cyclists and pedestrians and there is excellent access by public transport.

If people are provided with pleasant enough conditions for cycling then cycling becomes a positive choice for a large percentage of the population. No anti-car policies are required

Unicycling to school

Where child cyclists cross a bus-road near their school, it is the cycle-path which very obviously has priority.

The children shown in the photo are unicycling to a primary school here in Assen, unattended by any adults.

They're riding on the sidewalk alongside a bicycle path which provides the direct route to this school. It's perfectly safe to let children do this sort of thing here. The cycle-path provides priority for the children, including here where th cycle-path has priority over a road built specifically for buses.

There is another view of the same school, including a very short glimpse of a child with a unicycle, in my now quite famous video of children riding to school.

Lots of children here seem to know how to ride unicycles and it's not all that uncommon to see them going somewhere on them.

It doesn't even seem to be a particularly recent thing. This video (from BeeldenGeluid) shows a child unicycling to school in 1956:

The presenter says how "there are 500000 normal cyclists in Amsterdam, and one on a unicycle. He is joined by a peleton of other cyclists on the way to school. He is without bell, brakes, lights, steering but the police can't do anything about it."

This rider was 16 when the film was made, so he'll be 69 this year. I'd like to think he is still be riding that unicycle.

Note how he rides through something I've commented on before: an older Amsterdam which lacks cycle paths. It is sometimes assumed by people from other countries that the Netherlands has always been as it is now, but that is not true. There is a continual process of improvements for cyclists.

The Grid - How the Dutch found that the only thing which really encouraged cycling was a dense network of high quality infrastructure

The map on the right shows an area which is approximately 6.5 km wide. That on the left shows main routes only on a small portion of the map on the right, just over 2 km wide. Nearly all the coloured lines show the positions of good quality cycle paths separated from the road. Almost all the minor streets which are not highlighted work as through roads by bike but not by car so these provide a tighter grid than is shown in the picture.

Back in the 1970s, after the Stop de Kindermoord protests, the Netherlands went through a period of rapidly revising roads. Research had to be done in order to find out what worked for promoting cycling, in much the same way as the UK with their "cycling demonstration towns" in the mid 2000s (which unfortunately were abandoned). The Dutch research is documented in an article by the Fietsberaad.

One of the conclusions reached was that good quality cycle routes attracted cyclists but were of almost no use to most people if they were not very close together. This conclusion appears on page 43 of the article referred to above (page 41 of the PDF file) where there is discussion of the result of building a few sparse high quality paths in 1975 in both Den Haag and Tilburg. The evaluation in 1981 showed that these sparse cycle-paths had not significantly increased bicycle use across those cities. These paths were of good quality, acceptable even today. They were the sort of path that elsewhere might be referred to as a "superhighway". However, they were not effective because there was no real grid. i.e. they were too far from people's homes and destinations to be of use to everyone on all their journeys. People won't travel extra distance to get to a safe cycle-path, because the convenience has already been lost by doing so.

The experiment which worked, now copied everywhere in
the country: Delft main cycling route grid 2005.

Delft was the location of a different experiment. They built a three level grid. Here the city network had a a 500 m spacing, but there was also a district network with a 200-300 m spacing and a neighbourhood network with a 100 m spacing. These cycle facilities were within easy reach of every home and every destination and they brought about a permanent increase in cycling, as well as an increase in cyclist safety. It was concluded that policies discouraging car use are also needed, but the importance of a closely spaced grid of good quality routes for cyclists was established at this time and adopted quickly across the entire country.

That is how it was established that good quality cycle paths should be a maximum of 500 m apart and that extra cycle-paths should fill in the gaps so that cyclists never have to make detours to attempt to use better quality facilities.

It's now everywhere
The map at the top of this blog post comes from a presentation about plans for Assen given by the city architect on a recent Study Tour.

Conceptual version of "The Grid".
Primary red routes 500 m apart,
district routes in green and
neighbourhood in blue fill in gaps

The left half of the map at the top of this post is a close up of Kloosterveen, a new housing development of 8000 homes which is being built on the west of Assen outside the existing city boundary. This shows rough locations of just the primary-route cycle-paths through the suburb which provide access to schools, shops and other services as well as to the centre of the existing city and to the west to link up with villages and other towns. A new direct route to the city centre was built provided by 4 m wide cycle path and a 5 m wide bicycle road and over which the dual carriageway ring road was lifted on a new bridge. This attention to detail results in journeys from the new housing estate being quicker, more convenient, and more pleasant by bike than by car because there are no traffic lights on the route to the city centre by bicycle.

The right half of the image at the top of this post is a map of Assen and surroundings. In total the map covers an area about 6.5 km across, so you can see how closely packed these cycle paths are. Note that routes also go well outside the city, to all commuter villages around Assen and all the way to other cities such as Groningen 30 km directly North and Hoogeveen 40 km to the South.

There is a requirement within Assen that primary cycle paths are never more than 750 m apart. They're usually much closer than that. However, all is not lost if you're riding on a secondary route as these are also of very good quality.

Secondary cycle-route quality in Assen. This path is 3.2 m
wide so narrower than a primary route ought to be. Still very
adequate for the level of cycling traffic. Note that there are
always separate pedestrian paths.

The photo on the right is of a cycle-path on a secondary route. It is over three metres wide, not shared with pedestrians (they have their own 2 m wide path), it's very smooth and direct, it is lit at night, and it is a pleasure to cycle on. Good maintenance is required not only on the primary network, but also on secondary routes like this. See another blog post showing how cyclists came first when there were road works in this location.

Every area of the Netherlands has adopted similar guidelines. The grid of closely spaced high quality routes extends not just across one housing estate, not just across one city, not just to a few outlying developments of one city, but right across the entire country.

Unravelling of motor vehicle routes from bicycle routes has also resulted in a denser network of direct routes being available by bike than by car.

In practice this is how it works out for us: cycling from our home, in a culdesac we cycle not more than 200 m before we reach two different cycle paths which provide cycle routes to all locations. This is not remotely unusual, but rather what you'd expect for almost any residence in the Netherlands. See a video of one route from our home to the centre of the city.

Milton Keynes
has some cycle-
paths but not a
proper high
quality grid.

Other grid designs - Milton Keynes as an example
Some people may have noticed some similarity in the language above between the Dutch grid of cycle-paths and the grid of routes for cars which exists in cities in many other nations.

For instance, Milton Keynes in the UK is a "new town" constructed around an extensive grid of car routes which are just as effective at encouraging driving as the grid of cycle-routes across Dutch cities is effective at encouraging cycling. Building this grid to enable driving was a deliberate decision. Milton Keynes was designed as an expression of the ideas of Melvin M Webber, an urban designer who was famous for his ideas about "mass automotive mobility" and who was known as the "father of the city" of Milton Keynes.

Milton Keynes is dominated by cars today because this is exactly how it was planned to turn out. Dutch towns are dominated by bicycles because that is exactly how they were planned to turn out.

How good are the London & Toronto "grids" ?

What basic standard of infrastructure is required ?

Must the grid be made of cycle-paths ?

All posts about the importance of a good cycling grid

Further posts show how the route from the new suburb was built and what it's like to ride from the centre of the city to Kloosterveen and a video showing the route from the shopping centre at Kloosterveen back to our home.