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

Author: Thalia Verkade

Completed: Mar 2025 (Full list of books)

Overview: Seeing the changes that took place in the Netherlands over the last 50 years gives me hope that things in the US can change as well. We are constantly making choice about how we want our cities to be and this book helps examine many of the underlying assumptions we make. My main take away was that if everyone liked driving as much as we claim, getting to the destination fast wouldn’t be the top priority for roads. When biking, I often want to get places quickly, but I also like meandering to see different parts of the neighborhood. How can we create neighborhoods that encourage taking the slower, less direct route just because it’s fun to walk, run, or bike?

Highlights:

• 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, and in 2019 every sixth victim was a cyclist killed in a collision with somebody driving a car, lorry, or van.
• cyclists often move around like a flock of birds. ‘It’s precisely because traffic in Amsterdam is so risky that it’s actually safe,’ he says. ‘Amsterdam cyclists are always on the lookout. You need to use all your senses in this city.’
• ‘Why does it matter so much if people arrive home or get to work a few minutes later because of a traffic jam? Don’t you have to queue up at the supermarket from time to time?’
• ‘A traffic light really is a last resort, not just something to be installed any old where.
• ‘Over two-thirds of these parking spaces [in the Netherlands] occupy public land, and 92 per cent of them are provided totally free of charge.’ Public land. Aka the street. It’s only now I’m taking a proper look at the issue that it strikes me: the street is a place that belongs to everyone, and it’s there for everyone. Or it should be. It’s a shared space where people should be able to do just about anything they want, provided they can agree on it.
• We decide to buy two children’s car seats to begin with, which we can also use in any car we’re borrowing. It takes a bit of extra effort, but we don’t have the bother of parking, and this solution saves us a few hundred euros each month. With the money we’ve saved, we buy an electric cargo bike. If you line the box with long wooden panels, we discover, it has nearly the same capacity as the boot of a Lada Niva.
• ‘The fact that a motorway attracts traffic congestion is statistically proven, too,’ Bleijenberg continues. ‘Canadian researchers have measured this effect in several large urban regions in America. Lay 1 per cent more asphalt, and you get 1 per cent more traffic. The fundamental law of road congestion, they call it. Asphalt has been shown to attract cars: you can’t get rid of congestion by building more roads.’
• why is it that people enjoy going on holiday here so much? Isn’t it because you have to slow to a walking pace if you want to drive up to your bungalow to unload your luggage? And because you then park at a distance from where you’re staying, so your children can run off along the footpaths in clean air, carefree and safe, while you can enjoy a coffee or a drink in peaceful natural surroundings? If we enjoy this so much on campsites and holiday parks, we reflect, why shouldn’t we try to organise our own streets in the same way?
• To protect houses, squatters strung rope bridges across the street from the upper storey of one house to another, while residents protested at ground level. One man obtained listed building status for a house in the middle of the planned highway route, protecting it from demolition.
• So what happened to Jokinen’s proposals? In the end, only a tiny majority in the Amsterdam City Council (23 to 22) voted against pursuing his city highway plan. But it was still a majority.
• It’s different from Belgium, where moordstrookje (‘murder strip’) was the Flemish word of the year in 2018, referring to the far-too-narrow cycle paths demarcated by lines of white paint on provincial roads. Or Australia, where some drivers see cyclists as ‘less than human’.
• in the event of a traffic accident involving a driver and a cyclist or pedestrian, the onus lay on the motorist to prove that they were not responsible. This laid the foundation for what the Dutch call ‘the liability law’. The traffic liability law gradually acquired more substance through court judgments. In the last quarter of the 20th century, for instance, the Netherlands Supreme Court ruled that in the event of a collision between a motor vehicle and a non-motor vehicle, or with a pedestrian, the motorist automatically bears 50 per cent liability. In collisions involving children up to the age of 14, the motorist’s liability rises to 100 per cent, regardless of the degree of responsibility of the victim.
• A crash is often called an accident — but why do we call something an accident if it is the predictable result of policy? We could also call it systemic violence.
• The injustice of over-leniency in cases of reckless driving has inspired an epigram that’s become common currency: ‘If you want to get away with murder, buy a car.’
• If someone invented the car today, it would never be allowed on the roads. Think about it — a machine that kills thousands, contributes to respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, and requires more than half of public space in towns. 1
• Where will we end up if we continue to view mobility as a problem for which technical fixes, such as electric cars, bike highways, and increased speed limits, will automatically provide solutions?
• ‘Fewer autonomous cars, more autonomous children,’
• Can removing a road make it easier to drive more freely elsewhere? A major study of 63 roads and squares closed to motor traffic in various European cities (mainly in Britain and Germany) suggests that it does. In many cases, cars disappeared altogether, rather than being displaced into parallel streets, lessening the dreaded congestion.
• motor traffic around the tunnel melted away when renovation work began. BNR Radio announced, ‘The closure of the Maas tunnel is expected to cause major traffic problems,’ the evening before it was shut off. The next day, the local broadcasting organisation RTV Rijnmond reported, ‘The first evening rush hour after the closure of the Maas tunnel is no different from usual.’
• In 2019, The Hague inaugurated a school street inspired by examples from Flanders. The Abeelstraat, where cars used to stand at the school gates with their engines running, is now reserved for cyclists and pedestrians from a quarter of an hour before the school bell rings to a quarter of an hour afterwards.
• Why do we talk about traffic accidents? As if the one cyclist who runs down and kills a pedestrian — which hardly ever happens — were part of the same system that kills people day in, day out, which nearly always involves cars.’
• Build a city around the car and you’ll get motorists. But build a city around people and you’ll get pedestrians, cyclists, and children in the streets.
• Mouter and Koster asked people from Amsterdam to divide the limited budget available for the transport region among various construction projects, just as you might budget for a household. What they discovered through that experiment was that if you approach people not as consumers but as citizens, as members of the community, they are more inclined to choose projects that are good not just for themselves, but for the community in general.
• ‘I’m sure you feel that yourself now and then when you’re engrossed in a hobby, a sport, or playing an instrument: with a bit of luck, you experience it from time to time at work. These moments make us happy because they activate another aspect of who we are as humans — Homo ludens, the part of us that revels in playfulness,’
• Educate yourself on how to create change Take one or more of the MOOCs offered by the University of Amsterdam: Unravelling the Cycling City, Alternative Mobility Narratives, and Reclaiming the Street for Liveable Urban Spaces or Getting Smart about Cycling Futures. Read Marco’s free e-book, which forms the academic basis for Movement. Read Metaphors We Live By (George Lakoff and Mark Johnson), Thinking in Systems (Donella H. Meadows), Fighting Traffic: the dawn of the motor age in the American city and Autonorama: the illusory promise of high-tech driving (Peter Norton), and New Power: how power works in our hyper-connected world (Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms).