It’s all well and good talking about the principles of Sustainable Safety but there’s nothing better than an actual example to get the point across.

Quickly, let’s remind ourselves of the 5 principles:

1. Thou shalt not try to make one size fits all roads.
2. Thou shalt not mix vehicles with large differences in mass, speed, or direction.
3. Thou shalt provide familiarity via recognisable road design.
4. Thou shalt be forgiving of errors by road users.
5. Thou shalt make road users aware of their speed/ability via design.

Last week I found myself and the family visiting the in-laws near Rotterdam. We try to visit a couple of times a year, they live in the small village of Krimpen aan de Lek about 9 miles to the east of Rotterdam, out in the countryside really, but still within easy reach of the city.

To get from the village to the city, you can travel a number of ways, all of which require you to pass through Capelle aan den IJssel about 4 miles away.

The road running due west out of the village is the most direct route to Capelle, it runs through the fields for a few miles until it reaches Krimpen aan den IJssel and then carries on through residential streets until it joins the main road across the swing bridge over the river IJssel into Capelle. This road however is not open to motor traffic, only to walkers, cyclists, people on mopeds, and the odd tractor servicing the surrounding fields (all those crazy straight blue lines on the map are fields, well the slooten (ditches/canals) between the fields).

This most direct route out of the village is not open to cars or lorries. Once onto residential streets, vehicle speeds are kept low via the tactile road surface.

To travel to Capelle by car or bus you have to either travel along the dyke road along the river Lek to the south of Krimpen which is a slow, narrow, twisting road, or head north to the N210 provincial road (as shown on the map below). The N210 is definitely the best option, a nice straight smooth road with a 80kph speed limit and just a few turbo roundabouts to slow you down until you reach Krimpen aan den IJssel and cross the river.

The N210 is a provincial through road (to the left of the image) flanked by a wide parallel road (where the picture was taken from) for bicycles, mopeds, in-line skaters (seriously, speed skating is big over there), mobility scooters, and farm vehicles. Surface crossings at the roundabouts allow access to the other side of the road, but a particularly busy crossing has been turned into a bicycle underpass (right image above).

At some point in the past, what was the main route to Krimpen aan de Lek from Krimpen ann den IJssel (ie. the most direct route) was closed to motor traffic and this traffic moved to a more suitable location that bypasses the village unless the traffic is explicitly going there. The old route was then left free for bikes and walkers to travel peacefully between the two villages, while the new provincial N210 provides convenient and direct access to all villages along the Lek and to the next big town of Schoonhoven without pushing traffic through them all.

On another day, we drove from Krimpen to my brother-in-laws new home in Zwijndrecht, about 8 miles south across the river. There’s two ways of getting between the two towns, the first is the direct route.

It’s 11 miles according to Google and pretty direct, but it does require taking the car ferry out of Krimpen across the river which will add some time, plus it’s rural back streets going through the village of Kinderdijk before joining the motorway. Overall it’s not a very inviting route.

The alternative is the less direct route via the motorway.

We start by heading the wrong way out of the village to the N210 provincial road and follow it to Capelle, turn left towards Rotterdam and join the A16 motorway across the Nieuwe Maas river (an awesome 12 lane wide bridge) and then on to Zwijndrecht. A little over 16 miles in total but not a single residential or commercial street on the route after leaving Krimpen and arriving in Zwijndrecht. I’ll leave you to decide which route we took.

Of course, if it had been a nice day and we didn’t have a 4 month old baby in tow, we could have done the journey by bicycle, according to Google it’ll be only 9 miles and take us just over an hour.

These two little journeys demonstrate the result of applying the principles of Sustainable Safety to a complete road network. We end up with not only separated and comfortable travel conditions for all modes, but we also end up producing longer but faster routes for motor vehicles while also keeping the through traffic out of places people live and shop.