How did the Netherlands get its children cycling to school?

A country losing its children

Mass car ownership reached Europe after the Second World War, and Dutch cities made room for it. Traffic deaths rose every year from the 1950s and peaked at 3,267 in 1972. In 1971 alone, drivers killed more than 400 children (Wikipedia, 2026a).

In 1972 Vic Langenhoff, a writer at the newspaper De Tijd, lost his young daughter to a car. He wrote a front-page piece under the headline Stop de Kindermoord: "Stop the child murder" (Wikipedia, 2026a; Wikipedia, 2026b).

The words stuck because they were plain. Nobody called it a "road trauma statistic". A father called it what it felt like, and a country recognised it.

Parents took the streets back

A group formed in March 1973 under that name, with Maartje van Putten, later a member of the European Parliament, as its first president (Wikipedia, 2026a; Wikipedia, 2026b). It didn't just write letters.

• Members occupied intersections, such as a crossing on Albert Cuypstraat in Amsterdam.
• They ran a National Street Play Day, closing streets so children could play in them.
• They helped residents' groups fix the traffic in their own neighbourhoods.

(Wikipedia, 2026b)

The cultural insight is in the second item. The protest wasn't only against cars. It was for children in the street, as if a street belonged to the people who lived on it.

Ten Sundays without cars

Then came luck, of a kind. In late 1973 the oil crisis hit, and the Dutch government banned driving on Sundays. For ten Sundays, from 4 November 1973 to 6 January 1974, the roads emptied. People dusted off horse carriages, and cyclists and roller skaters took over the boulevards (Wikipedia, 2026c).

The ban barely saved any fuel. People drove on Saturday instead and came home late Sunday night (Wikipedia, 2026c). But for ten weekends, a whole country saw its streets full of people, quiet and safe. The protests and the oil shortages together turned government policy around (Wikipedia, 2026d).

What they built

Here's a story worth knowing. In Delft, residents tired of speeding cars went out late at night and tore up their own street's paving, so drivers had to slow down around the obstacles. The idea became the woonerf, a "living street" shared by people and slow cars. In 1976 it went into the national street design standards. Cars in a woonerf are limited to 15 km/h, and by 2011 about 2 million Dutch people lived on one (Wikipedia, 2026e).

Over the next decades the country built the rest.

The Netherlands now	Figure
Cycle track physically separated from cars	about 35,000 km
Bicycles	about 18 million, 1.3 per person old enough to ride (2012)
Share of all trips made by bike	27%
Secondary students who cycle to school	75%, and 84% of those within 5 km

(Wikipedia, 2026d)

And the roads became safe. By 2013, deaths had fallen 83% from the 1972 peak, to a record low of 570 (Wikipedia, 2026a). The country with the most people on bikes made its roads safer, not deadlier.

What the ride to school does for a child

Riding to school is exercise that happens without anyone scheduling it. A review of 68 studies found that children who walk or cycle to school are mostly more active overall, and that cycling to and from school is linked with better heart and lung fitness (Larouche et al., 2014).

The habit pays off into adult life. A UK study of commuters found that people who cycled to work had a lower risk of heart disease, of cancer, and of dying from any cause, than people whose commute involved no activity. Their risk of dying was about 40% lower (Celis-Morales et al., 2017). That study observed people rather than assigning them to bikes, so some of the gap may come from who chooses to cycle. The direction still matches every other line of evidence on moving more.

If you want to know how much daily movement matters, see How much movement undoes a day of sitting?

Australia went the other way

In 1971 most young Sydney children walked to school: 57.7% of those aged 5 to 9. By 1999 to 2003, it was 25.5%. Car trips rose from 22.8% to 66.6% (van der Ploeg et al., 2008).

Australian parents aren't lazier or more fearful by nature. Both countries faced the same rising car traffic in the same years. The Dutch built streets where a child could ride safely, and Australia mostly built streets for cars. Parents in each country made the sensible choice for the streets they had.

The hopeful part

None of this took a miracle. It took a father willing to say the plain words, parents willing to stand in an intersection, and residents willing to dig up their own street. It took about a generation, and the result is still carrying children to school every morning.

Things you can do or check:

• Walk or ride the route to your local school with a child, and note every point where you'd hold their hand. Those are the places to fix.
• Ask your council whether the streets around the school can close to cars at drop-off and pick-up, or run a street play day.
• Ask what share of the council's transport budget goes to footpaths and separated bike lanes.

Streets are built. Whoever speaks up decides who they're built for.