LETTER: Dutch cycling example not a blueprint for Saanich<\/p>\n
Published 6:30 pm Saturday, March 7, 2026<\/p>\n
The Netherlands is frequently invoked in debates over cycling infrastructure in Saanich. The argument is familiar: the Dutch built bike lanes, cycling flourished, and safety improved. Therefore, we should follow the same path. But this framing skips over a critical distinction. Dutch cycling infrastructure emerged from a pragmatic response to a specific and measurable failure in street design.<\/p>\n
In the 1950s and 1960s, Dutch cities saw rising road fatalities as faster, heavier traffic was layered onto streets that still functioned as shopping streets, tram corridors, market areas, and pedestrian spaces.<\/p>\n
By the early 1970s, traffic fatalities had surged to roughly 25 deaths per 100,000 people annually \u2014 a genuine public-safety crisis. The response was pragmatic: fast traffic was given its own corridors, cycling infrastructure was built as a fully separated network, and roads were designed according to the job they were meant to do. The result was a system fully compatible with widespread car use. Most Dutch households own a vehicle \u2013 bicycles account for roughly 27 per cent of trips, and cities such as Rotterdam support major multi-lane arterials.<\/p>\n
Cycling works there because the conditions strongly favour it. Cities are dense, daily trips are short, terrain is flat, and weather is comparatively forgiving.<\/p>\n
Saanich and the Capital Regional District operate under very different conditions. The CRD spans roughly 2,340 square kilometres \u2014 more than 10 times the size of Amsterdam. Amsterdam averages roughly 5,000 people per square kilometre; the CRD averages about 175. That scale shapes trip length, mode choice, and the role arterials must play for commuters.<\/p>\n
These conditions also exist in the absence of a comparable safety crisis. Across the CRD, traffic fatality rates average roughly two to three deaths per 100,000 residents \u2014 an order of magnitude lower than the levels that triggered Dutch reforms, and lower than those recorded in the Netherlands today.<\/p>\n
Crucially, Dutch reforms built on an existing reality: large numbers of people were already cycling. The same structural conditions that favour cycling today \u2014 dense cities, short trips, flat terrain \u2014 had made it the dominant mode of transport long before any infrastructure was built. The task was not to change how people travelled, but to make a common activity safer \u2014 protecting cyclists without displacing motor traffic on primary corridors.<\/p>\n
Saanich\u2019s approach reflects a different logic. Reduced car capacity is increasingly treated as an instrument of change \u2014 an effort to reshape behaviour through design, rather than allowing design to respond to existing behaviour. That shift takes concrete form in projects like Tillicum Road, where two general-purpose vehicle lanes were removed to create protected cycling lanes. Where Dutch design accommodated established patterns of movement, local interventions increasingly set drivers, cyclists, and transit users in opposition to one another, turning street design into a statement about how residents are intended to travel.<\/p>\n
If there is one lesson worth drawing from the Dutch experience, it is that the Dutch were willing to acknowledge when planning choices produced worse outcomes \u2014 and to correct course.<\/p>\n
Learning from international examples is valuable \u2014 but only when we understand why they built what they did, and whether those conditions actually exist here.<\/p>\n
Joshua van Es<\/p>\n
Saanich<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LETTER: Dutch cycling example not a blueprint for Saanich Published 6:30 pm Saturday, March 7, 2026 The Netherlands…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":521849,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[445],"tags":[49,48,635,82],"class_list":["post-521848","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cycling","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-cycling","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521848","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=521848"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521848\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/521849"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=521848"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=521848"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=521848"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}