‘No faster than 15 km/h on roads without a footpath’ | Inland

This is the opinion of director Peter van der Knaap of the Road Safety Research Foundation (SWOV). Safe Traffic Netherlands (VVN) and the CROW foundation – knowledge institute for infrastructure, public space, traffic and transport and safety – support his appeal.

Van der Knaap: “Now that our country wants to build a million homes in the coming years, we must design the streets in those neighborhoods to be traffic-safe from the outset. This means that we must provide sufficient space for pedestrians, including children, by means of sidewalks or a 15 km/h device.”

The VVN hotline receives many complaints about road safety in new neighborhoods. In Veenendaal, Elst, Hillegom, Beverwijk, Lelystad, Harderwijk and Apeldoorn, among others, many parents are concerned about the safety of their children.

‘We are building long streets again’

Van der Knaap understands those concerns. “Recently built residential areas are usually more traffic-safe than the new housing estates of the 1970s and 1980s and certainly than old city districts. But unfortunately in this new century we are also building less safe residential areas with what traffic experts call ‘long straight lines’. Streets that are straight over a length of more than a hundred meters without a sidewalk and where you can drive at 30 km/h, but where, according to residents, delivery vans often drive even faster, and electric cars also accelerate quickly…”

Many parents of children find the speed limit of 30 kilometers per hour on such streets too high. Due to the lack of a sidewalk, they are literally awake by the thought that their child could be hit by a car. “And those parents are often just right,” says the SWOV director, “because at that speed a motorist needs 13 meters to come to a stop. That 13 meters does not have a playing child.”

Van der Knaap: “A maximum of 15 is not news at all, but a basic principle from Sustainable Safety Road Traffic, the approach that has been leading in the Netherlands since the mid-1990s.”

The problem, according to VVN, is only that it is described as a preferred option, but that it is not illegal to omit it. “Let’s hope that municipalities will simply build sidewalks or reduce speed when designing new residential areas. Because you don’t want situations like in De Aurelius in Elst. Pedestrians there have to make do with a grass strip next to the carriageway. Every home has an exit that slopes down: children on roller skates, go-karts and bicycles roll onto the street, as it were,” says spokesman Rob Stomphorst.

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