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One morning in October of 1971, a six-year-old girl named Simone Langenhoff was riding her bike down a road in the southern Netherlands. Suddenly, a careless driver whipped around a blind corner and crashed into her. In an instant, Simone became one of some 450 children killed by automobiles in the Netherlands that year. That horrific toll had been rising steadily as the tiny European nation, like virtually all of its Western peers, came to rely increasingly on cars. In the first part of the twentieth century, the Netherlands had not embraced the automobile with quite the gusto that America had. But, as the country’s prosperity grew after the Second World War, so did the number of private cars on its roads. Lethal accidents increased apace. 

But Simone’s father, Vic Langenhoff, a prominent newspaper columnist, wasn’t willing to accept his daughter’s death as the price of progress. Instead, he founded an organization to push for safer roads, with the hard-to-ignore slogan of “Stop the Child Murders.” The group staged protests, occupied roads, and drew increasing support. Similar activist outfits sprang up in Copenhagen, Montréal, and other places. It took some time, but, gradually, the Dutch activists gained ground. City governments across the Netherlands began to reengineer streets and change policies with the explicit goal of diminishing the use of automobiles on public roads.

The results are dazzling. In today’s Amsterdam, it seems everyone gets around on bicycle—not just the fit young people you see riding in American cities, but suit-wearing businessmen, wrinkled senior citizens, moms with kids, humans of all shapes, sizes, and cardiovascular abilities. The city itself has been retrofitted to make biking easy, convenient, and, above all, safe. Bike lanes aren’t just marked by a stripe of paint; they are physically separated from cars by concrete curbs. And they are knit together to form a continuous, cohesive network that allows riders to travel pretty much all over the city without having to mingle in traffic with automobiles. That bicycle network connects directly to an excellent public transit system. Next to Centraal Station, the city’s main train hub, is a huge, multistory bicycle parking structure crammed with thousands of bicycles. Locals and tourists alike ride to the station, stash their bikes, then take one of the clean and affordable trains to destinations farther afield. More than one out of every three trips taken in Amsterdam is now made by bike. Only one out of every two households even owns a car. In a modern city of nearly one million people, those are astonishing statistics. 

Excerpted from Chp 11 of Power Metal: The Race for the Resources that will shape the future by Vince Beiser.