Source: Stadszaken, SWOV

Although there have been low traffic fatality numbers for many years in the Netherlands, the rate has more recently been increasing, with a total of 759 recorded in 2025, the highest since 2007. Martin van der Maas, an urban planner at the Municipality of Amsterdam, examined misplaced priorities, and allocation of blame towards cyclists and pedestrians.

Martin draws attention to the unsuitability of increasingly large cars and strained urban traffic infrastructure for the 21st century. Car traffic travelling at high speeds is given priority, posing hazards and significant inconvenience to other road users: “Bicycle lanes and sidewalks that are too narrow, too many obstacles, insufficient freedom of movement for children, frequent merging, excessive waiting times, and dangerously close passes to speeding, overweight vehicles.”

Martin speaks about this strong adherence to traffic culture from personal experience. Five years ago, his wife was injured while attempting to cross on a zebra crossing in Alkmaar in the early evening. The driver of the car had appeared to stop, but then suddenly pulled away, striking Martin’s wife and sending her over the front of the car.

It transpired that the elderly driver later admitted he could no longer see well at dusk, but also that his greatest concern was keeping his driver’s license, for daily visits to his wife in a nursing home – a trip of one kilometre, along a bus route.

Shifting the blame

Martin was informed by a policewoman in the aftermath that the driver’s case was with the judicial authorities, and that he and his wife would not hear anything further about it. The policewoman also emphasised that Martin’s wife had been wearing a dark coat – which Martin counters with the fact that it is a wide zebra crossing, with warning signs and bright overhead white lighting.

Martin and his wife indeed did not hear anything further from the driver, but did see him continuing to drive for several more years. Despite other accidents occurring on the same road, which has a 50 km/h speed limit, no changes have been made. Discussions about implementing a standard 30 km/h speed limit in Alkmaar have met with political opposition, despite mounting evidence of such measures bringing positive safety outcomes.

Three types of blame-shifting are identified:

• Priority blaming: from the car culture advocates’ point of view, it’s the right-of-way for pedestrians and cyclists that is the problem, not the car. Pedestrians and cyclists are expected to wait longer to cross or manoeuvre safely, while any extra waiting time for traffic is not acceptable.
• Fatbike blaming: these have become an easy scapegoat, helping to shift focus from space-consuming car lanes, and stoking in-fighting among pedestrians and riders of standard bikes, cargo bikes, fatbikes over the remaining space available.
• Victim blaming: shifting responsibility from car drivers to the victims of road traffic incidents. Car culture advocacy puts the onus on more vulnerable road users to make themselves safe from dangerous traffic; “They need to pay more attention, they wear the wrong dark coats, they need to wear a helmet.” Martin states, “According to the logic of victim blamers, my wife and I should now be walking around hyper-alert in fluorescent clothing and pedestrian helmets. But that would be the death of the city, the legitimization of the perpetrator, and the subjugation of the victim.”

The toxicity of traffic culture

Martin summarises how this traffic culture can be described:

• The right of irresponsible people to drive outweighs the right of children to grow up with living and healthy parents.
• The right to drive freely and fast outweighs the right to walk and cycle safely and comfortably through the city.
• The right to drive SUVs outweighs the chance for pedestrians and cyclists to survive an accident.

The obstruction of more spontaneous and space-saving mobility represented by pedestrians and cyclists is obstruction of the solution to the design for safe streets in the modern world. “There are plenty of possibilities for this, provided we settle for fewer, smaller, and slower cars. The fact that our cities simultaneously become more beautiful, healthier, and more pleasant is a welcome bonus for everyone.”