Amsterdam residents feeling less safe in traffic; Still refuse bike helmets

Amsterdam is ranked fifth among European cities where people don’t feel safe in traffic. More and more Amsterdammers feel unsafe on the roads, and the vast majority believe that traffic safety is deteriorating. At the same time, Amsterdam is first in the raking when it comes to resisting bicycle helmets, Parool reports based on an annual European study by Cyclomedia, which works on behalf of the municipality of Amsterdam, among others.

Some 12,000 people participated in the Cyclomedia research. The researchers interviewed 300 Amsterdam residents. Athens topped the ranking for feeling unsafe in traffic.

Of the Amsterdam participants in the study, 83 percent think that traffic safety in the city is deteriorating. 45 percent of Amsterdammers feel unsafe in traffic, compared to 41 percent last year and only 28 percent a year earlier.

The bike paths are even scarier for Amsterdam residents, with 56 percent saying they don’t feel safe while cycling. If the cycle paths were widened and pavements improved, 61 percent would cycle more often. Amsterdammers don’t think a bike helmet would help. 44 percent are strongly opposed to a mandatory helmet—the highest percentage of all participating cities.

The study also showed that 70 percent of Amsterdam residents attach importance to better separation of different road users, while Amsterdam is working on more mixed-use roads in the city. Experience in Amsterdam shows that in several places, mixing traffic ensures that the speed of traffic decreases, according to Parool.

Traffic alderman Melanie van der Horst is worried about the declining sense of safety on Amsterdam roads. “The fact that people are increasingly taking their cars instead of cycling or walking is a very worrying development. We cannot suddenly adjsut the infrastructure in the entire city, but we are working on this every day. We are adding more and more school streets and cycle streets, we are making cycle paths wider and tackling unsafe intersections,” she said to the newspaper.

Van der Horst is pleased that the study also showed that 68 percent of Amsterdam residents support reducing the speed limit for cars to 30 kilometers per hour, which the city implemented late last year. “Limiting the speed of bicycles is now one of my most important priorities. That is now a major problem for many Amsterdam residents and one of the causes of many accidents with children,” she said.

Many respondents pointed to fast e-bikes as a cause of decreased road safety. “Although our police are already enforcing this strictly, I hope that the government will soon come up with additional measures to make the streets safer again.”