Movement: How to Take Back Our Streets and Transform Our Lives

By Thalia Verkade, Marco te Brömmelstroet and Peter Norton

“This book will—no question—make you think in new ways. Why have we surrendered our cities to cars? What might it be like to inhabit a space designed for people instead? It’s exciting and hopeful—this we can do!”
—Bill McKibben, author of The Flag, The Cross, and the Station Wagon

Almost everywhere in the world, streets are designed for travel at the highest speed, giving precedence to the chunkiest vehicles. We take for granted that the streets outside of our homes are designed only for movement from one point to another. But what happens if we radically rethink how we use these public spaces? Could we change our lives for the better?  

In Movement: How to Take Back Our Streets and Transform Our Lives, journalist Thalia Verkade and mobility expert (“the cycling professor”) Marco te Brömmelstroet take a three-year shared journey of discovery into the possibilities of our streets. They investigate and question the choices and mechanisms underpinning how these public spaces are designed and look at how they could be different. Verkade and te Brömmelstroet draw inspiration from the Netherlands and look at what other countries are doing, and could do, to diversify how they use their streets and make them safer.
 
During the pandemic, decision-makers in cities around the world were confronted with the questions of who our streets belong to, how we want to use them, and who gets to decide. Making our communities safer, cleaner, and greener starts with asking these fundamental questions. To truly transform mobility, we need to look far beyond the technical aspects and put people at the center of urban design. Movement will change the way that you view our streets.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Island Press
• Release date: May 2, 2024
• ISBN: 9781642833454

Thalia Verkade

Thalia Verkade (1979) lives in Rotterdam. She has been a staff writer and foreign correspondent for the Dutch national newspapers NRC Handelsblad and nrc.next. For the ad-free slow journalism platform De Correspondent she has written extensively about the topics she loves most: language, transport, and technocracy.

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About Island Press

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Movement

how to take back our streets and transform our lives

Thalia Verkade and Marco te Brömmelstroet

Translated by Fiona Graham

Foreword by Peter Norton

Washington

Covelo

First published in 2020 in the Netherlands as Het recht van de snelste by De Correspondent (decorrespondent.nl/en) a member-funded journalism platform for independent voices.

© 2024 Thalia Verkade and Marco te Brömmelstroet,

Foreword © 2024 Peter Norton

Translation © 2022 Fiona Graham

Excerpt from ‘Excuse’ on p.51 © Pierre Kemp, used with kind permission from Van Oorschot.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher: Island Press, 2000 M Street, NW, Suite 480-B, Washington, DC 20036-3319.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023950990

All Island Press books are printed on environmentally responsible materials.

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Keywords: Access, bicycle, bicycle highway, child-friendly school environment, congestion, COVID-19, cycling, Cycling Professor, intersection, the Netherlands, parking, pedestrian, public space, speed limit, street, street safety, stroad, time travel budget, traffic, traffic calming, traffic engineer, traffic victim

ISBN-13: 978-1-64283-345-4 (electronic)

Contents

Foreword by Peter Norton

Prologue

Part I. The Streets Belong to All of Us

Why has traffic taken over our public space?

Part II. Caution — Children at Play

How have cars changed the environment we live in?

Part III. The Story That’s Never Told

Who are the victims of this system?

Part IV. On Automatic Pilot

Where will we end up if we carry on this way?

Part V. Public Space as if People Mattered

What happens if you try to do things differently?

Epilogue. What’s the Next Step?

Some ideas for action

Acknowledgements

Endnotes

Glossary

Index

About the Authors

Foreword

By Peter Norton

In the most-viewed TED talk ever, Sir Ken Robinson warned his audience that the prevailing doctrines in education have been failing children. In their commitment to academic achievement, schools punish mistakes. The consequence, Robinson said, was that children who began school as boldly creative beings with precious gifts to offer the world are ruthlessly coerced out of their creativity. Teachers resist individually, but must do so within the confines of the system in which they work. To maximize learning, schools unwittingly devastate the very engine that drives it: creative curiosity.

Instead of prescribing another way to extend children’s attention spans to improve learning outcomes, Robinson advised educators to drop their presuppositions. He asked them to shut up, to listen, and to observe. There was nothing new in Robinson’s message, but he delivered it through a new medium to a vast new audience. The deficiency lies not in children’s attention spans, but in educators’ doctrines. The necessity, then, is not to find more and better ways to pursue educators’ goals, but to find new goals that are consistent with children’s real capacities.

Much like conventional education doctrines have failed children, policy makers, planners, and engineers have failed communities. Like establishment educators, they imposed their conception of order on their subjects—and when the consequences disappointed, they redoubled their efforts. Like educators faulting adventurous children for not sitting still, they blamed cities themselves for the very attributes that make them vibrant.

The policy makers’ errors began in remote offices, where doctrines hostile to cities took hold. Yet, as we inherited the cities that these doctrines distorted, we also inherited the doctrines themselves. As new ideologies redefined streets as motor thoroughfares, we eventually grew to think them that way, too, and to depend on streets to work that way. We, too, learned to consider anything that limited vehicular throughput a nuisance.

Much as we pathologized children’s creativity to conform it to education doctrines, we pathologized urban vitality to conform it to engineering doctrines. The authorities reduced the horror of traffic deaths to statistical tables and normalized the wasteful extravagances of car dependence. Eventually, most of the rest of us did as well. Our task, then, is not to find more and better ways to pursue the authorities’ goals, but to find new goals that are consistent with our communities’ real capacities.

Thus, Thalia Verkade and Marco te Brömmelstroet did not set out to write a how-to book about fixing up city streets—though they do offer practical guidance. Their purposes, like Ken Robinson’s, are both more ambitious and more realistic. As Verkade explains, Movement guides readers to a perspective from which they can never look at the street. . . . in the same light again.

Though Verkade and te Brömmelstroet are, in this respect, revolutionaries, they also belong to a long tradition of writers and doers who have recognized that the doctrines that bound us to the status quo in our cities cannot free us from its bonds. Like Jane Jacobs, the authors of Movement understand that our problem is not merely that we have the wrong official doctrines, but that we have official doctrines at all. Also like Jacobs, Movement’s authors are not armchair theoreticians but people engaged in the practical work of observing, listening, and acting.

Yet, if Movement joins this long tradition, it is also categorically new. Worldwide, advocates of the transformation we need in our cities and their streets have long recognized the Netherlands as the best practical example we have. Far from perfect—as Dutch people themselves are the first to tell you—the Netherlands has nevertheless proved like no other country that car-dependent cities can be transformed into vibrant places in which streets serve more people, with greater efficiency and safety, than the highway engineers could ever achieve. In so doing, cities can also reduce costs, promote commerce, cultivate public health, and foster inclusive sociability.

Working as I do in the United States, I have often found myself claiming that our streets can and must serve our cities better, only to encounter a stubborn perception that the necessary change is impossible. When this happens, I wish that I could somehow deliver the skeptics into a street in Utrecht or Groningen or Rotterdam, where car dependency actually has been substantially set aside, liberating streets for far more rewarding possibilities—with such self-evident advantages for all that almost no one there would have it any other way. It is comforting to know that the next time I encounter this perception, I can offer them a copy of Movement.

To learn from the Netherlands, advocates of better streets have had plenty of excellent Dutch sources in English, in the form of news articles, blogposts, podcasts, and YouTube channels. Thalia Verkade and Marco te Brömmelstroet themselves have contributed substantially to this body of essential material. Books on the subject in English by Dutch authors have been exceedingly rare, however. We have had an abundance of intellectual snacks but a deficit of nourishing meals. Proponents of cycling can refer to the volumes of the Cycling Cities series issued by the Foundation for the History of Technology in Eindhoven or to Henk-Jan Dekker’s recent Cycling Pathways. Yet, works about streets as a whole, in English but written by Dutch authors featuring Dutch examples, have been sorely lacking.

Movement meets this urgent need. It does so, moreover, in a uniquely illuminating way. Te Brömmelstroet, as the advocate and evangelist, gives Movement its zeal, its urgent call for ambitious but necessary change. Verkade, the journalist, comes to the subject with the reporter’s professional commitment to asking the hard questions and insisting on credible answers. This is exactly the right combination for a book whose readers are ready to consider radical change, but who rightly insist on practical realism.

Critics of the change we need like to call it implausible or far-fetched. In Movement, Thalia Verkade and Marco te Brömmelstroet prove that the most far-fetched urban vision we have ever pursued was the elusive city in which car dependency works. The path to something better, they show, begins quite easily. We can begin by ceasing to pursue the impossible city where everyone can drive anywhere without delay, and park when they get there. That was the truly absurd vision, not the practical city of diverse mobility. The most practical vision is the one that sets aside official doctrine in favor of observed reality. With Movement, we have a uniquely inviting, pragmatic, and inspiring articulation of just such a vision.

Prologue

This book is about our streets and why we take it for granted that they are designed first and foremost for movement from A to B, rather than incorporating other uses that could benefit our communities in different ways.

I’m Thalia, a journalist based in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, and I had never asked myself this question before I started writing this book. For me, the street was just a place outside my front door that I walked, cycled, or drove through on my way to somewhere else. The road markings, lanes, boxes, and traffic lights were necessary to ensure people’s safety; I didn’t think much more about them. What I did think about, while waiting at a red light yet again, was why things couldn’t be faster and more efficient.

Then I met Marco, the ‘Cycling Professor’, a specialist in urban mobility who’d led a very different life to me, and who, as a social scientist, asked different questions. Such as: why do we accept that public space is unsafe and we need road markings and a highway code to make it safe? And: have our streets become through roads precisely because people view them as the exclusive domain of fast-moving traffic and design them accordingly? And: is this why people increasingly behave like mechanical moving parts in a traffic system instead of living, thinking human beings?

It was this clash between our implicit world views that sparked this book, a three-year shared journey of discovery into the possibilities of our streets. We’ve investigated and questioned the choices and mechanisms underpinning how these public spaces are designed, and looked at how they could be different, and we’d like to invite you to come along for the ride.

Just one significant caveat: read this book and you may well find that you can never look at the street outside your front door in the same light again. We can’t, and many people who’ve read our book in Dutch have told us they’ve had the same experience.

And now there’s an English edition. This has made us reflect on the relevance of our story in an international context. Almost everywhere, streets are designed on the basis that those who can travel at the highest speed, in the chunkiest vehicles, take precedence. And that includes in the Netherlands. You may be surprised to learn this, as we have the reputation of being a cyclist’s paradise, with 37,000 kilometres (nearly 23,000 miles) of cycle paths, many of them segregated. We’ve also developed bike traffic lights, rain sensors that reduce cyclists’ waiting times at traffic lights in wet weather, bike-friendly speed bumps, roundabouts with priority for cyclists, bike parking garages, bike highways (segregated cycle paths for fast-moving commuters), and bike streets (streets where cyclists have priority over motorists for once). Sounds great, right?

Yet we in the Netherlands are also coming to understand the limitations of our solutions. Our infrastructure, designed for cyclists alongside motorists, has led to a situation in which everyone can now get from A to B with maximum speed and efficiency. Cyclists can ride at full tilt, just like motorists, each traffic category in its own segregated channel. But has this made our streets safer? Studies suggest not — in the Netherlands, a higher proportion of people are killed in traffic accidents than in the UK,¹, ² and in 2019 every sixth victim was a cyclist killed in a collision with somebody driving a car, lorry, or van.³ Aside from this, what about people who want to move at a leisurely pace? What about children playing outside their homes? What about the street as a place to meet neighbours; a place with shade, plants, water; a place of belonging? Assigning everyone their own fast-moving channel further reinforces the notion that streets exist to accommodate drivers or speedy cyclists, rather than as public space to be shared by us all. We’ve also lost sight of the fact that bicycles have the advantage of enabling people to get about while also allowing the street to serve other purposes. And we’ve forgotten that getting about doesn’t have to be a chore — it can also be an activity with a value of its own.

So, in this updated edition of the book, we will still talk about the Netherlands — what we can learn from the 1970s activists who battled against the belief that the design of public space should revolve around the car and the commuter, and how we can carry that forward today to make our streets serve our communities in more ways than just one. And we will also look at what other countries are doing and could do to diversify how they use their streets and make them safer.

Many major cities worldwide — partly because of the COVID-19 pandemic — are seeing a growing awareness of the questions at the heart of this book: who do our streets belong to, what do we want to use them for, and who gets to decide? It goes without saying that they must meet the demands of sustainability, liveability, and safety. That’s the bottom line. But as ultimate aims, these aren’t exactly inspiring, are they? With enough will and civil courage, the problems posed by traffic can be transformed into a challenge extending far beyond the technical aspects. What’s at stake is far greater: the broad social question of how we want to live together. Real change could come if we seize the opportunity to rethink what public space is for, who decides, and what we want to do with it.

This is Movement. Will you join us?

I

The Streets Belong to All of Us

Why has traffic taken over our public space?

Our next car would be an electric model. That was what we decided when I returned home with my partner from Moscow in 2015, after one and a half years as a foreign correspondent for a leading Dutch newspaper. We’d had to leave behind the world’s coolest car.

During our first winter in Moscow we’d watched Russians driving Nivas — four-wheel-drive Ladas — over frozen lakes. What the Niva lacked in heated seats or automatic windscreen wipers, it made up for with a lever that engaged the differential lock, so you could extricate yourself from snow or sand half a metre deep. Or go for a spin over the ice.

‘Lada. Just what you need. And nothing you don’t.’ Our dark-blue Lada Niva came new from an official dealer. We drove her all over the Moscow region, and once my stint as a correspondent was over, she took us through the mountains of the Caucasus.

We camped out in the wilderness and spent half a year at 2,000 metres’ altitude in a Georgian village without a single shop, not even a bakery. We’d have been lost without our Niva.

And then something unexpected happened. We had to sell her though she hadn’t even clocked up 30,000 kilometres (nearly 19,000 miles). We’d have liked to take her back to the Netherlands, but it turns out you can’t drive a Niva in the EU, not even a brand new one. What comes out of the exhaust pipe is too dirty for European standards. Bang went our dream of travelling home with a detour via the Balkans.

Once we were home — how nice it was to be back in a democratic country and to be able to cycle everywhere — we saw the advantages of those EU emissions standards. We had a baby on the way. Our child wouldn’t have to blow black mucus into a hanky every evening, as we’d done in Moscow.

In Russia, I had seen what an economy overdependent on mineral resources can do to people. Those who control Russia’s oil control the country. There is a yawning gulf between rich and poor. Another issue that struck me was climate change. With a direct link to the future growing inside me, I began to feel more urgency. How liveable would our planet remain? What could we do for the next generation? Did we really want to perpetuate existing problems by buying another petrol-guzzler?

I began to follow Elon Musk on Twitter — the man behind Tesla electric cars. From California, he aimed to convert the whole world to e-mobility, with a rechargeable car in front of every home.

‘Tesla. Accelerating the world’s transition to sustainable energy.’ In his many media appearances, Musk said his over-riding aim is not to make Tesla a world-beater, but to nudge all car manufacturers into producing electric vehicles. And he’s been as good as his word: in 2020, there were 10 million electric cars on the roads and sales were up 40 per cent on the previous year.¹ Sounds impressive, but this is still less than 1 per cent of all the cars out there.

I found Musk’s message inspiring. The more I learned about electric cars, the more I saw them as the way forward to a green and democratic future. And how great it would be to walk the talk, so that one day our son would be able to say his parents had been among the first people to drive an electric car! That’s how we decided our next car would be an electric model.

But it wasn’t to be a Tesla. When we took a test drive in a Model S, the acceleration gave me acid reflux. On the back seat, my partner had to tilt his head; though the car looks big from the outside, it’s cramped inside.

Impressive though Musk’s take on energy might be, his car wasn’t right for us. We carried on researching. Soon a clear winner emerged. The Renault Kangoo, with its pleasingly boxy design. The Kangoo would be our electric Lada. Now all we had to do was wait for a second-hand one we could afford.

Solving the Congestion Conundrum

While we were looking for our next car, I began writing articles about electric vehicles. Then another problem in search of a solution appeared on my radar — traffic jams.

Driving an electric car is all well and good, but you still don’t want to come to a standstill. I’d had my fill of traffic jams in Moscow: staying alert while waiting gradually sapped my will to live. What a waste of precious time. Traffic jams are a major irritant to all drivers, and the delays they cause are a drain on the economy.

I discovered there are high-tech solutions from the United States targeting this problem too. Google, Uber, and Tesla are working hard to make self-driving cars a reality. It won’t be long before your car can coordinate a trip efficiently with other vehicles, allowing you to relax with a video or a book.

Hopeful though that sounded, it was still some way off. Wasn’t there a simpler solution?

Of course there was. Hey, this was the Netherlands!

The solution was bicycles.

‘Every day, about half a million cars get stuck in traffic during the morning rush hour. If ten per cent of those drivers cycled instead, traffic jams would be a thing of the past.’ So said Saskia Kluit (director of the Dutch Cyclists’ Union) and four wethouders (members of the local executive, elected by the local council) from major cities, in a message to the new Dutch government in May 2017.²

‘Yes!’ I thought. If people cycled to work just once a week, traffic jams would all but disappear. If many more people cycled, the climate crisis and our petrol addiction would be history, surely? We already had electric bikes, enabling riders to cover much longer distances without getting tired. The first speed pedelecs, which could do 45 km/h (nearly 30 mph), were on the roads.³ We even had recumbent bikes that could hit 133 km/h (over 80 mph), a world record established by Dutch students.⁴ That was over the motorway speed limit.

Just one thing: not all Dutch cities were yet linked by high-speed bicycle highways. Why was that? What was the problem?

I set out to write a series of pieces on ‘cycling versus congestion’ in the seven weeks I had left before my maternity leave for my second baby. I contacted the Dutch Cyclists’ Union, sketched out my plan for my readers, and arranged to interview Marco te Brömmelstroet, an urban planning expert at the University of Amsterdam.

And here’s where the story really starts.

Let’s Just Get those Bike Highways Sorted

Marco te Brömmelstroet, alias ‘the Cycling Professor’. A handy moniker for a man with a tricky surname — and an intriguing one, too. A title like ‘Cycling Professor’ guarantees you a place in newsrooms’ address books, including mine.

On the way to the