2023-05-26 04:19:53
When people think of the city of Amsterdam, they probably imagine a lot of bikes, as the capital of the Netherlands has come to have more bikes than citizens. Even in several international media they assure that 60 percent of citizens use this means of transport.
However, this city was not always like this, because before the cars were the owners of the streets. Although, before World War II, there were already bicycle lanes, they were very different from those known today, since they were narrow, dangerous and without intersections, according to information from the ‘Maillot’ portal.
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Between 1948 and 1960, the gross domestic product (GDP) grew by 222%, which made it easier for its citizens to buy high-priced products; among them, the cars. In the 1960s, the streets were full of motor vehicles. For this reason, in some old cities in the Netherlands, buildings were demolished so that the roads were not so narrow and cars could circulate comfortably.
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So many automobiles brought with them the increase in accidents. According to the same media, in 1971 there were more than 3,000 people killed in traffic accidents, and around 400 were children.
This fact caused several people to mobilize in the streets to protest the death of minors. It was then that the ‘Stop Kindermoord’ movement was created, which means ‘Stop the murder of children’. At that time, safe spaces were requested for children and also for pedestrians and cyclists.
The journalist Vic Lan-Genhoff was the one who invented the name of this movement when he put it in an article, since he too had lost his children in a traffic accident. After Lan-Genhoff’s publication, the Union of United Cyclists was born, who were in charge of promoting and defending the movement, as they went out with their bicycles to block the roads and ask for more space. This caused the government to build more cycle paths in the 1970s.
This was key for things in the city of Amsterdam to start to change. Then two years later In 1973, the oil crisis began in the Netherlands, due to the war between several Arab countries that produced hydrocarbons and Israel.
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In the case of the Netherlands, they supported Israel and suffered the blockade of oil imports; this caused gasoline prices to quadruple. It was then that the Dutch government changed its mentality and they started building more bike infrastructure and introducing policies to encourage change, one of which was car-free Sunday.
Then, little by little, the infrastructures that currently characterize Amsterdam began to be built. Nowadays, cycling policies are integrated in all the cities of the country, even with a Bicycle Embassy.
In the city of Amsterdam there are about 847,000 bicycles belonging to 442,693 households. 80% of its inhabitants own a bike and almost 60% use it daily. On the other hand, in the whole of the Netherlands there are 23,000,000 bicycles.
DANIELA LARRARTE ASAAD
DIGITAL SCOPE WRITING
TIME
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