Most people assume the Dutch have always cycled, but in the 1960s the Netherlands was rebuilding its cities for cars — in 1972, 3,264 people died on its roads

The Netherlands is famous for cycling. But its cycling network is not simply a gift of flat land or national character. It is the result of political choices made from the 1970s onward, under pressure from a grim road death toll, public protest and an oil crisis. Before that, Dutch cities were increasingly being built around cars, while cycling was widely treated by planners as a mode in decline.

After the Second World War, Amsterdam and other Dutch cities increasingly accommodated motor traffic. Amsterdam’s own history of cycling describes how its city council came to focus traffic policy on the car, while policymakers saw cycling as a “dying business.” Roads were widened, major road schemes were proposed, and the bicycle was increasingly ignored in planning.

Prosperity was a major reason cycling declined. The rapid postwar reconstruction of the Netherlands was accompanied by economic growth of about 4% a year between 1950 and 1975, while passenger cars increased from roughly 150,000 in 1950 to nearly 2.5 million by 1970. Car ownership went from exceptional to ordinary within a generation.

Planners remade cities to suit that traffic. Main roads were widened and ambitious urban motorways proposed. The share of journeys made by bicycle fell sharply in many Dutch cities. The assumption was that the shift toward motor vehicles was permanent, so protecting cycling probably seemed less important than finding more room for cars.

The human cost reached its peak at the start of the new decade.3,264 people died on Dutch roads in 1972.  The figures helped turn traffic deaths from something accepted as the cost of modernisation into a political issue.

One death gave the numbers a face. Dr Maartje van Putten, who would become a leading figure in the protest movement, recalled that in 1971 a six-year-old girl named Simone Langenhoff was killed by a driver while cycling to school.

Simone’s father, Vic Langenhoff, was a journalist at the newspaper De Tijd. In September 1972 he published an article calling for a pressure group named Stop de Kindermoord — “Stop the Child Murder.” Records of the organisation are now held by the Dutch National Archives. The phrase became the name of a movement that challenged the idea that deaths on the roads were simply unavoidable accidents.

The campaign moved into the streets. Stop de Kindermoord organised demonstrations, occupied dangerous locations and arranged days when streets were closed so children could play safely. Cycling activists became increasingly organised as well. In 1975, several groups came together to form what became the Dutch Cyclists’ Union, arguing that bicycles needed more space and cars less.

Then a shock arrived from outside. During the 1973 Arab oil crisis, the Netherlands was singled out for an embargo because of its support for Israel. Oil prices rose dramatically across the West. Archival research later found that the embargo itself did not leave the Netherlands substantially worse supplied with oil than neighbouring countries, but at the time the threat of shortages was serious enough for the government to impose emergency restrictions.

Private motor traffic was banned on Sundays beginning in November 1973. For a series of Sundays, roads normally dominated by cars became places where people walked, cycled and even gathered on motorways. The measure was intended to conserve fuel, but it also gave millions of Dutch people an unusually vivid look at what streets without normal levels of motor traffic felt like.

Reversing the car-first approach did not happen at once. Dutch cities began experimenting with traffic calming, restrictions on cars and better routes for cyclists. The 1970s also saw the spread of the woonerf, a residential street designed around low vehicle speeds and pedestrian priority. In Amsterdam, a formal cycling policy introduced from 1978 eventually produced a main network of safe cycling routes, built through thousands of changes over decades.

The network visitors now sometimes treat as timeless was therefore neither timeless nor inevitable. Dutch cycling had survived the postwar rise of the car, but its modern infrastructure emerged from a deliberate reversal in transport policy. Public anger over road deaths, organised activism and the political shock of the oil crisis all helped push that reversal along.

The Netherlands did not simply remain a cycling country. It made a sustained decision to become one again.