Dutch City Converts Unused Pavement Into Bicycling Safety Course
A painted obstacle course in Zwolle, the Netherlands, that simulates cycling for children. (Source: Gemeente Zwolle.)
You’ll find plenty of praise for the Netherlands from Strong Towns and our like-minded allies. From the school with a bike trail on the roof to multi-modal transportation options that prioritize all users, Dutch planners and engineers clearly focus on solutions beyond just moving cars through cities.
The city of Zwolle has just unveiled an impressive new tool to teach its population to cycle safely. At first glance, it looks like a Fisher-Price play mat expanded to city-block size.
Set in a former schoolyard, Zwolle designed a painted obstacle course that simulates cycling in an urban environment. Young riders will encounter stop signs, marked crosswalks, and one-way lanes. It even sports a traffic square, a common formation in the Netherlands, and a drop-off lane next to a stenciled building.
In a press release (translated by Google), the city says the goal is to enable children to “learn to cycle in a playful way and practice and improve their cycling skills.” The ultimate end result, according to creators Gooitske Zijlstra and Arjan Broer, is that “children from [the neighborhood] will develop more interest in cycling and will use their bikes more often.”
This idea is easily replicable using paint or, more cheaply and less permanently, chalk. Given how much unused pavement there is in North America, there’s almost certainly a slab near you to start experimenting.
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Ben Abramson is a Staff Writer at Strong Towns. In his career as a travel journalist with The Washington Post and USA TODAY, Ben has visited many destinations that show how Americans were once world-class at building appealing, prosperous places at a human scale. He has also seen the worst of the suburban development pattern, and joined Strong Towns because of its unique way of framing the problems we can all see and intuit, and focusing on local, achievable solutions. A native of Washington, DC, Ben lives in Venice, Florida; summers in Atlantic Canada; and loves hiking, biking, kayaking, and beachcombing.