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If You Like It Then You Should've Put A Ring-Road On It

What if I told you that you could guarantee zero traffic deaths in your city?

Imagine having the creative freedom to build a city from scratch. You'd have to consider how much green space to include, where the city center would go, and what modes of transportation to support. If you could prevent thousands of traffic deaths, would you orient all car traffic to a single ring around the outside of town like the City of Houten did?

Houten is medium-sized, at 58.99 km² (36.65 miles²) with a population of about 50,000 people. Believe it or not, since its conception over 50 years ago, there has not been a single traffic death in Houten. That's zero traffic deaths, total.

Houten was built in the 1960s from the ground-up, an initiative of the national government that was dealing with a massive population boom like most Western cities during this period of post-WWII prosperity. The Netherlands government essentially said, "Okay, we're going to have ten million more people moving here and we've got to put them somewhere; how about over that tiny village over there with the one railroad running through it and the church?" And that's how Houten was born.

As the new town council and mayor were making decisions for how the town would be built, they were faced with a choice. They could fall in line with the car-crazed fashion of the era, or they could listen to community outcry around the nation about how many children were being killed by motor vehicles and how much space was being eaten away for roads construction.

They were bold, visionary, and deeply compassionate, and they chose to go against the grain and build a city that was oriented around walking and cycling instead of cars. 

But the people moving into Houten would be car owners, so they couldn't simply ban them. Instead, they directed car traffic to the outside of the city to what the Dutch call a ring-road, pictured below. Every neighborhood in Houten is connected by a two-way bicycle track, but no car-only streets run between them. If one wanted to drive from one neighborhood to the next, they'd have to drive out and around the ring-road to get there. By designing the city this way, nearly all routes take longer to navigate by car than by bicycle.


The City of Houten, Netherlands.

The City of Houten didn't have to ban cars to keep people from relying on them. Instead, they made it more logical and pleasant for people to bike than to drive. Human beings make rational decisions based on things like happiness, convenience, social pressure and time saved. Rational choice is actually a well-established principal of American economics.

Decision-makers in Houten realized that they were responsible for how residents live day in and day out. How they feel, what they do and how they do it. And they were in a position to do something about it. They made decisions based on the lifestyle that they wanted their people to have - a lifestyle oriented around health, social interaction in vibrant public spaces, and with virtually zero risk of dying in traffic.

 A housing development in Houten connected by picturesque bike/ped bridges. 

I mean, I for one enjoyed myself. We biked the entire city in a day!

Biking doesn't have to be reserved for first mile/last mile trips; biking can be every mile. As planners and decision-makers, we are responsible for people's lifestyles, all the way down to how much time they have to spend with their kids, how much social interaction they can access, and how much exercise they can get in a day. When we're designing our cities, whether we're building from the ground-up or adding to what's already there, we get to make choices about the quality of life that we want our people to have. If building and maintaining unsafe car-oriented road infrastructure essentially guarantees that people will die, shouldn't we stop building them?

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