PH wrote:I understand much of the Netherlands infrastructure came about in the 70s as a result of the oil crisis, when people were open to the idea of change.
The Netherlands had a great deal of cycling infrastructure already, prior to the 70s. What turned around in that decade was that they stopped dismantling it to make way for increasing motor traffic and started building more and better facilities. And the main force behind this turnaround was not the oil crisis but the huge numbers of Dutch cyclists, especially children, who were getting killed by that increasing traffic. The reason this happened in the Netherlands and not here, is that cycling has always been huge in Holland.
Some cycling campaigners would have you believe that there's nothing special about the Netherlands, nothing they've done that we couldn't easily copy. They will tell you that cycling declined in the Netherlands just like it did here. In percentage terms, so it did, to about a third of its post-WW2 peak, but from a MUCH HIGHER PEAK.
Once the Dutch had replaced all the bicycles stolen by retreating Germans, cycling accounted for up to 90% of urban trips. The comparable figure for Manchester in the 1940s was about 30%. That's nevertheless a great deal of cycling, a level produces those iconic images of workers all-a-wheel pouring out of factory gates as the end-of-shift hooter blows. Fast-forward to the 1970s and British cycling levels have fallen to a meagre 10% of trips in towns. In the Netherlands meanwhile, cycling has also fallen to a third of its former level, but still accounts for about 30%.
So: the Dutch turned things around when cycling was still a mass movement, accounting for just as much of the traffic as it EVER did in postwar Britain. Meanwhile, the new drivers responsible for the
other two-thirds of Dutch traffic found themselves in what the Military call a target rich environment! What turned things around in the Netherlands was not the oil crisis - though it probably helped - but public outrage at the slaughter, particularly of children, almost all of whom cycled to school. And in 1970s Holland, with most adults and everyone's children - irrespective of wealth or position - still using bikes for at least some their everyday journeys, there were still a lot of votes in cycling.
In Britain it was much easier to ignore the smaller number of deaths. At only 10% of trips it looked like cycling was on the way out. It made as much sense to build facilities for
that as for riding a horse to work!
Cycling didn't die out of course, but remains stuck at a vestigial level, where there's not enough of it going on to justify the construction of a quality of infrastructure that might make it an attractive alternative to driving - except in places where driving is totally impracticable.