What do Victor Veilig and Benni Brems say about Subjective Safety ?

Over the last few years in the Netherlands, small yellow boys, 80 cm tall, have become a more common sight on the streets.

Victor Veilig ("Safe Victor") and his older German cousin Benni Brems ("Benni Brakes" - link no longer works) are claimed by the manufacturers and distributors to remind drivers to slow down. Victor and Benni are light in weight and parents are told that they should place him outdoors when their children are playing outside and take him back in again when they are finished.


Advertisement by the insurance company Univé, who offer a free Victor Veilig if you buy their car insurance
Residential streets are supposed to be safe places. Children are supposed to be safe. What's more, children should have a degree of freedom over when they can play outside and not necessarily have to communicate and negotiate their exact hours of outside play with their parents so that the doll can be correctly placed by the road. It's all a bit absurd.

In fact, parents don't take this doll in and out of doors each time their children go outside.

These days, Victor is usually to be found chained permanently to a lamp post. Victor Veilig now has a use which goes beyond what the manufacturers intended. He has become become a negative indication of subjective safety. Victor's purpose now is to show where parents do not feel it is safe for their children to play outdoors. Here are three examples from Assen:

This one is in the new suburb of Kloosterveen. I'm mostly very enthusiastic about Kloosterveen because the overall environment here is good for cycling. For instance, there's a well designed shopping centre and a dense grid of good quality cycling infrastructure which helps a large proportion of children to cycle to school. But it's not perfect by any means. In particular, a mistake was made on this road. This feeder road is quite busy with cars and was originally intended to have a cycle-path. Indeed, for a while there was a temporary cycle-path while final designs were being decided upon. However, residents were given a choice of designs to choose from and the chosen design was without a cycle-path. At least one family finds the situation now to be unpleasant enough such that they do not think their children are safe.

In a 1950s area of Assen, again on a feeder road which carries a few too many cars. There is a primary school to the right of the crossing. Note that this junction has caused problems for a while. There are warning signs here, a raised table to slow drivers and also a pinch point at the crossing itself. This pinch point is itself badly designed as it puts cyclists into conflict with drivers heading in the same or opposite direction. There are two permanent Victors here. The other is hidden by the car in the centre of the image. This area was designed with very little cycling infrastructure and relies upon segregating drivers from cyclists by other means.

In a 1970s suburb, that in which we live. While cycling infrastructure exists in this suburb it doesn't quite make a full dense grid. This road with a 50 km/h speed limit runs the length of the suburb without a cycle-path. It's not much used as a through route because it is bypassed by a direct 70 km/h road and is designed to be indirect in order to slow traffic, however this is still the worst road to cycle along in our suburb. Two Victors have taken up permanent residence here - one blown over by the wind.

Rather than marking a place where children play, these dolls actually show where children do not play.

Look out for Victor Veilig in photos of infrastructure from the Netherlands. If you see him then it's a sign that the infrastructure that you're looking at probably does not meet the standards of parents who want their children to be safe. If a photo of Dutch infrastructure has a Victor Veilig in it or if you look at a street yourself and see Victor then question why he is there. If something is claimed to be a good example but Victor is present, then there is probably a reason why it is not such a good example and it's quite likely not something that you want to be imported to your country.

Read more about successful design for residential streets. Also read more about the importance of subjective safety for a high cycling modal share.

According to some Dutch sources, Victor Veilig was originally seen in the USA. What names does he have in English speaking countries ? Perhaps "Benny Brakes" or "Sam Safety" ? Perhaps even "Jack Jumpsoutofthewayratherquickly" ?

Note that the original Unive advertisement which I embedded above was pulled from youtube, so I replaced it with another example in January 2015.

Stop the Child Murder

I often get asked what can be done to increase the cycling rate in countries outside the Netherlands. It's often noted that there is little government or public enthusiasm for spending even small amounts of money on the small number of people who are currently cyclists.

I think it's a good idea to look at what worked in the Netherlands.

Cycling in the Netherlands declined sharply in the post-second world war period. In the 1950s and 1960s, existing cycle paths were in many cases removed in order to make space for more cars. "From 1950 to 1975, the bicycle was almost entirely excluded from the government's vision"(Dutch Bicycle Master Plan 1999). The number of deaths on the roads rose, especially amongst children on their way to and from school. In 1972, a total of 3264 people were killed on Dutch roads, and at around the same time, in 1973, 450 road deaths were of children.

Note that this was a long struggle. The
photo shows Minister Zeevalking
receiving information from protestors
in 1982. (wikimedia)

1973 was also the year that the pressure group "Stop de Kindermoord" ("Stop the Child Murder") started. The object of this group was to point out the number of deaths caused to children and to campaign to reduce them. They successfully influenced the Dutch government to re-emphasize building of segregated cycle paths, and to make money available to pay for them. This resulted in both a rise in cycling and a reduction in cyclist deaths, reversing the previous trend. It has been a success not only for child cyclists, but for all cyclists, and indeed for the population as a whole.

There is a lesson here for other countries. I'll take Britain as an example.

It is difficult to campaign for better conditions for "cyclists" in Britain. Cyclists are a minority group, and not a very well liked minority at that. Cyclists can be considered to be an out-group. This is a large part of why it is that cycling initiatives come and go in Britain. There's no real emphasis placed on results because too few people see it as important. When cyclists in Britain are hit by cars, they get very little sympathy from the public at large.

Campaigning for child safety is different. Very different. Children are not a minority group. Most families include children, all adults used to be children. Child safety is an issue which is important to everyone and difficult to ignore. All parents want their children to be safe.

It is clear that there is a problem with child safety on the roads in the UK. This is the underlying reason why it is that children are increasingly being driven to school. It is the reason why American style school buses are proposed for British kids, and even the reason why someone made the news for driving with his walking child on the school run. When British parents attack traffic wardens next to a school, they even do this in part out of concern for the safety of their own children. These are not solutions to the problem, but they are reactions to it. They demonstrate that parents are not remotely happy with the roads as they are.

Campaigners often talk about there being a suppressed demand for cycling in Britain. It's true. There is. When I was a campaigner in the UK, many people would tell me that they were very keen to take up cycling, but for one reason or another.

However, the suppressed demand for conditions in which children are safe on the streets is very much greater. This is what any campaigner who wants to see mass cycling return to the UK ought to be campaigning about. Get parents on your side and there will be a mass move to change infrastructure and improve conditions.

I can see the responses from a certain element of the cycling community in the UK. i.e. those who are concerned about being "forced" to use sub-standard shared-use paths next to the road. However, this is all part of the problem. Sub-standard facilities are of no use to anyone. Not only are they no good for confident adults to cycle on, but they will also never provide the level of subjective safety required for British parents to think their children are safe on a bike. I've seen many examples of what happens in Britain. Planners think that if they provide a couple of hundred metres of astonishingly bad quality shared use next to a school that they've actually done something. People afterwards ask why it is that such facilities are not used. The answer is very simple: they are not usable. The quality is much too low. Tokenism isn't the answer.

It's a grave mistake to think that low quality off road provision "for slow and inexperienced cyclists" is all that is needed, and that "fast cyclists" will always be better off on the road. If separate infrastructure is not good enough for a confident adult to use then it's not good enough for kids to ride to school on either.

The differences between British and Dutch streets are very easy to see. They're actually almost exactly the same as the differences between Dutch streets in the 1970s and now. i.e. British streets now resemble Dutch streets 40 years ago. It's not actually all that expensive to achieve such a transition - it simply takes a consistent policy over years.

Road casualties in the Netherlands have dropped steeply, even as cycling rates have risen. Now approximately 720 people per year die on Dutch roads. 180 of them are cyclists, and 22 of those are children. The cycling figures may sound high, but they are in part a reflection of the number of cycle journeys made. The Dutch now experience an overall risk which is less than a quarter of that in 1973, and for children it's now a twentieth of that in 1973. Dutch cyclists are now the safest in the world. Of course, the campaign goes on to reduce the figures.

Meanwhile, British roads have become safer for drivers, but they have not achieved such good results for vulnerable road users. It would only take about fifteen years to turn this around, following which even better plans can be made.

Between 1972 and 2013, fatalities on the roads dropped
dramatically in the Netherlands. Child fatalities have
reduced to just 2% of the previous level.

2014 update
Since this blog post was written, Dutch roads have continued to get safer. In 2013, there were a total of 570 road deaths in the Netherlands, just nine of whom were under 15. Five were child cyclists, four were child pedestrians. Even one death may be seen as too many, but this is still startling progress over the peak in the early 1970s.

How success was achieved
Note that this great success in improved safety was achieved with children still cycling en-masse, and without distractions such as bicycle helmets. The improvement in safety came due to improving the infrastructure which people use. The Netherlands now has an extensive grid of high quality cycling infrastructure which covers the nation. This doesn't only serve children, but all cyclists and cycling is safer in the Netherlands than in any other nation.

In 1989, "Stop de Kindermoord" changed its name to "Kinderen Voorrang" ("Priority for children"). In 2001 they became part of the larger road safety campaign, 3VO / Veilig Verkeer Nederland ("Safe Traffic Netherlands") who continue to campaign for lower road deaths. The statue in the photo is "Fietsles" ("cycling lesson"), by Kees Verkade. It's in Groningen, here.

Do you want to know more about the history of cycling in the Netherlands, read more stories tagged with history and the articles linked from here, particularly The Dutch Master Plan 1999. There are also many stories about school travel. Also another post referred to current work of Veilig Verkeer Nederland.

I recommend also reading responses to this post by Karl McCracken, Dave Warnock and NicoleP.

Dutch children must cycle at an earlier age

An interesting piece on the front page of our local newspaper in Assen this week, with a headline "Children from Drenthe must cycle earlier."

The article reads: Primary schools are opening on Monday. The holidays are over, and this is reason for Safe Traffic Netherlands to restart their "The schools have begun again" campaign.

Also in this region, children will be travelling to school in large groups for the first time. In September there is a peak in the number of traffic victims in the age group 0-14 years. A salient detail is that one third of these victims are on the way to or from school. Children are an unpredictable group.

The article goes on to explain that in 1972 the average age at which Dutch children went unaccompanied to school was six years. By 2006 this had risen to 8.6 years of age. The reason given by parents for this rise is that they find the conditions too dangerous. This is an issue of subjective safety of course.

The approach suggested by the safety pressure group here is different to what might be expected in the UK and other countries. They are suggesting that children should be allowed greater freedom earlier as more and earlier experience makes children safer on the roads: Practice in traffic is an important part of bringing up children.

VVN calls on parents to send their children to school by foot or by bike as often as possible. It is important to choose the safest route possible and to practice this route with your children. Children only learn by doing, and children become safer as they travel independently to school.

A safe road environment around the school is important. Other participants in traffic around the school play a part.

The view is that it isn't children who cause a problem but adults, and that children should be able to travel unaccompanied by the age of six. An average age of eight, as now, is a bit too old.

Preventing danger to children on the way to school and home again takes several forms, including banning cars from stopping near schools and providing cycle routes which are safe for children to use, even over quite long distances and in winter.

Veilig Verkeer Nederland has also been running spots on the radio about the danger posed to children by drivers:

The longest running TV advert in the Netherlands was is also from this organisation:


VVN are also the organisation which takes care of school cycle training in the Netherlands.

A comparison with Britain is interesting. In Britain there has been a much deeper drop in walking and cycling to school. Now only 12% of seven to 10-year-olds go unaccompanied to school and an enormous national media storm and threats of social services being called in occurred over the Schonrock's children after their parents allowed them to cycle to school unaccompanied. Read the family's own response here. The idea of sending children unaccompanied to school by bike is mainstream in The Netherlands, though of course children here benefit from infrastructure which supports that choice.

In other news, cycle training for children in England is apparently about to be cut altogether as the government considers scrapping "Cycling England", the organisation which for the last few years has been responsible for the "cycling demonstration towns" and other initiatives to support cycling. This comes as part of the austerity measures needed to help the ailing economy - not that the problems Britain currently faces were in any way caused by cycling. This makes no sense at all, of course, but sadly nor did many of the initiatives that Cycling England supported, as the late Chris Hutt used to point out.

Unfortunately, it looks a lot like business as usual for British transport policy. Initiatives come and initiatives go, and people keep forgetting that they've been let down time and time again. There's no real interest in achieving a higher rate of cycling, no overall picture of what is needed, and no consistency to carry on with any policy for long enough that it makes a difference. That's why cycling is flatlining in Britain.

Britain isn't the only place with a problem, of course. We campaign for the right of independent travel for children everywhere.

There are many other examples of school travel in the Netherlands on this blog. Unfortunately I must also point out that for all the good they do, VVN is also a bit too close for comfort to a certain Swedish car manufacturer and their dubious ideas about road safety. Another blog post explores the origins of Veilig Verkeer Nederland?.