Stop de Kindermoord

Bike Boom: The Unexpected Resurgence of Cycling

by Carlton Reid  · 14 Jun 2017  · 309pp  · 84,038 words

Facilities reported that “Europeans [were] returning residential areas to residents and restricting the through movement of automobiles in these areas.” Remarking on campaigns such as Stop de Kindermoord (see chapter 8), she said such restrictions in the Netherlands were the “result of the safety problem with young children and the need to reinforce

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opportunity to ridicule and reject the conservatism of their car-owning parents. Han van Spanje, a Fietsersbond official and a former chair of the 1970s Stop de Kindermoord campaign (which I’ll explain below), told me: There was a shift in society [in the 1960s], something in the air. People wanted to do

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mainstream.” Many of the former radicals did, indeed, settle down and become parents, but that didn’t stop them agitating. Where the Provos left off, Stop de Kindermoord took over. IN 1971, Dutch motorists killed 3,000 people, 450 of whom were children. One of these was the child of Eindhoven-based journalist

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Vic Langenhoff, a senior writer on the national newspaper De Tijd. In anguish, he wrote an article headlined “Stop de Kindermoord”—“Stop the Murder of Children.” He urged that children be taken to school by bus rather than walk or cycle. His article hit a nerve

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, and urban activists were inspired to create the Stop de Kindermoord campaign organization. Led by Maartje van Putten, a 23-year-old new mother, the new body advocated not for school buses but protection from motorists

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extend and improve the already extensive cycling infrastructure in some parts of the Netherlands. This persuasion was done at a face-to-face local level, Stop de Kindermoord’s Han van Spanje told me: We always started locally, not nationally. We were a campaign group, but also an information source. School governors would

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engineers.” Most of us were cyclists, but it wasn’t a cycling campaign. When you say you want to save kids, who can oppose that? Stop de Kindermoord organized demonstrations across the nation, usually with many children in tow. Crucially, it didn’t just shout and moan—it also offered practical solutions. The

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. He drew up child-friendly street designs specific to whichever local authority or municipality asked for them. Stop de Kindermoord did a pillar-style deal with the national government: it paid Schepel’s salary. (In 1989, Stop de Kindermoord changed its provocative name to Kinderen Voorrang—“Priority for Children”; in 2001, it was subsumed by the

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provided with “play streets” where motor traffic was much reduced. The run-down De Pijp area was later gentrified and is now an exclusive neighborhood. Stop de Kindermoord! (“Stop the Murder of Children!”) logo. TWO LONG-RUNNING grassroots road-safety campaigns in Britain had many of the same features as

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Stop de Kindermoord, yet they did not result in nationally safer roads for pedestrians and cyclists. The first was a two-year campaign staged by worried Londoners who

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unmoved: the hated bridges stayed put. The demonstrations became weaker and weaker, until they finally petered out. Two years of Stop de Kindermoord-style protests in motor-centric Britain had come to nothing. Stop de Kindermoord had other equivalents in the UK, including ones happening at the same time as the Dutch one. “Local people should

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crossing—one of the other demands—was later installed, but the 1970s protests in London did not have the same national effect as the similar Stop de Kindermoord campaign in the Netherlands. Why did the Dutch campaign work while the British ones didn’t—at least, not to the same degree? Partly it

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city, yet people still cycle. The words on the truck door warn cyclists to “Beware of blind spot.” THE PROTEST groups—the Fietsersbond, the Provos, Stop de Kindermoord, and the rest—had all played a part in creating a culture of street-level awareness for everyday cycling. This—slowly—changed minds and influenced

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Car-Free Amsterdam, 202 Caro, Robert, 30 Carpinteria, California, 70 Central Park (New York City), 31, 65–66 Chicago, Illinois, 59–61 children. See also Stop de Kindermoord campaign Alness Report and, 47 association with, 25–26 baby boom and, 129–131, 190 cycling to school, 172, 175 Holland and, 181 regulations and

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, 145 Stanford University, 150–152 steel horses, 61 stereotypes, 12–13 Stevenage cycleway system, 9, 92, 137, 161–176, xix Stoke-on-Trent, England, 107 Stop de Kindermoord campaign, 137, 194, 197–199, 198 Stovall, Lou, 124 Surface Transportation Assistance Act, 156–157 Sustrans, 106, 107–108 Swart, Randy, 229–231 Swinging Sixties

How Cycling Can Save the World

by Peter Walker  · 3 Apr 2017  · 231pp  · 69,673 words

, Langenhoff used a full page in de Tijd to announce a new road safety pressure group. The name was revealed in a dramatic banner headline: “Stop de Kindermoord,” or “Stop the Child Murders.” The organization was, he wrote, “trying to break through the apathy with which the Dutch people accept the daily carnage

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’s article galvanized the fears and anger of millions of Dutch people who resented the sudden and unannounced tyranny of these anonymous, deadly metal boxes. Stop de Kindermoord turned swiftly into a major protest organization. Its members used innovative, direct-action tactics like staging mass “die-ins” and occupying busy roads, turning them

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of separated bike lanes and tamed vehicle traffic has proved the model around the world. It’s possible none of this would have happened without Stop de Kindermoord. Most other European nations stuck with the supremacy of cars for several more decades, leaving bikes as the niche domain of hobbyists and die-hard

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to argue the changes begun by Vic Langenhoff saved many thousands of lives. He died in 1997, and spoke little in his later years about Stop de Kindermoord. But Anita Langenhoff, now fifty-six, finds it hard to even consider the positive repercussions from her sister’s death, an event she says she

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and cities happened, it was mainly a bottom-up, demonstration-led process. As we saw earlier, a big impetus in the Netherlands came with the Stop de Kindermoord mass movement for child-friendly streets. In Copenhagen, up to 150,000 people massed outside the city hall in the 1970s “demanding to get their

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Safe International Road Travel, “Annual Global Road Crash Statistics,” http://asirt.org/initiatives/informing-road-users/road-safety-facts/road-crash-statistics. 3 Vic Langenhoff, “Stop de Kindermoord,” De Tidj, September 20, 1972. Translation from Dutch by Mark Wagenbuur. 4 Interview with the author. 5 Fietsberaad, “Cycling in the Netherlands,” 2009, http://www

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, who advised me about several people to talk to. Also thanks to Mark Wagenbuur, who runs the Bicycle Dutch blog and who kindly translated the Stop de Kindermoord article in chapter 2. Finally, huge thanks to my wonderful editors, Andrew Yackira and Joanna Ng, and my fantastic agent, Rachel Mills. ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves From the Tyranny of the Automobile

by Sarah Goodyear, Doug Gordon and Aaron Naparstek  · 21 Oct 2025  · 330pp  · 85,349 words

Dutch people accept the daily slaughter of children in traffic.” The name he suggested for this group was written right into his manifesto’s headline: Stop de Kindermoord, or “Stop the Child Murder.” Langenhoff’s powerful words attracted the attention of a young mother and experienced organizer in Amsterdam named Maartje van Putten

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, who became the first national president of the official Stop de Kindermoord organization. According to Van Putten, the perils of traffic had robbed pedestrians in general and children specifically of access to the streets. “We have lost

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list. New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the UK weren’t that much farther ahead. It isn’t all because of the efforts of those early Stop de Kindermoord campaigners—a robust social safety net and a society that puts tight restrictions on guns certainly helps—but safe streets where children can be active

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,” he said. “If bike bus leaders play our cards right and do the right things to build this movement, this could be our generation’s Stop de Kindermoord.” 4 Cars Ruin Nature Everybody loved Barry the barred owl. That was what made it all so sad. For a brief flicker of time during

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/pulse/day-1971-how-dutch-reclaimed-streets-children-adam-tranter-hhf1e. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT He called for the formation: Vic Langenhoff, “Pressiegroep Stop de kindermoord,” De Tijd, September 20, 1972. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “The car has disrupted our way of living”: Together We Cycle, written by Gertjan

The Miracle Pill

by Peter Walker  · 21 Jan 2021  · 372pp  · 98,659 words

, a prominent Dutch journalist, whose six-year-old daughter had been killed by a speeding driver as she cycled to school, launched a campaign called Stop de Kindermoord, or Stop the Child Murders,16 sparking a campaign of civil disobedience in the Netherlands which directly led to successive governments reshaping the nation’s

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much of the impetus for these changes came from the public. We saw earlier that the transport revolution in the Netherlands was sparked by the Stop de Kindermoord (Stop the Child Murders) road safety mass protests of the 1970s. Copenhagen saw similar scenes later in that decade and into the 1980s, pushing authorities

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road deaths “not matched by cyclists and pedestrians” ’, The Guardian, 30 January 2020. 15 Colin Buchanan, Traffic in Towns (London: Penguin, 1964). 16 Vic Langenhoff, Stop de Kindermoord, De Tijd, 20 September 1972. Langenhoff wrote the article after his daughter Simone had been killed by a speeding car. The driver was fined the

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, 131–4 Starc, Gregor 255–7 St Mary’s Hospital, London 93 St Ninian’s primary school, Stirling, Scotland 203–7, 213 Stockholm, Sweden 141 Stop de Kindermoord (Stop the Child Murders) road safety mass protests, Netherlands (1970s) 121, 240 strength/muscle training 22, 223, 228, 271–2 stroke 5, 46, 61, 81

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation

by Paris Marx  · 4 Jul 2022  · 295pp  · 81,861 words

the United States.6 Naturally, residents demanded action. Among the groups that were formed to oppose the remaking of the city for the automobile was Stop de Kindermoord, which translated to “stop the child murder.” The group’s name was reminiscent of the evocative language that was seen on US streets in the

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Research Institute, 54–5 Stanford University, 39–40, 55, 120 Stark, Tony, 70 Starley, John Kemp, 160, 162 Starship Technologies, 172, 173–5, 176–7 Stop de Kindermoord, 205 streetcars, 12–3, 15, 21, 92, 160 “subscriber city,” 197 suburbanization, 23 suburbs, 12–3 superhighway plan (Detroit), 22 supply chains, 50 Surface Transportation

Building the Cycling City: The Dutch Blueprint for Urban Vitality

by Melissa Bruntlett and Chris Bruntlett  · 27 Aug 2018  · 230pp  · 71,834 words

of the future.” The blowback was swift and monumental, leading to the founding of dozens of grassroots activist groups, the largest and most persuasive being Stop de Kindermoord (“Stop Child Murder”), formed in response to an eponymously titled, full-page editorial in De Tijd (“The Times”) by journalist Vic Langenhoff. Langenhoff—grieving the

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collisions change in North America, it will be impossible to achieve the Vision Zero goal across the continent. He notes at the time of the Stop de Kindermoord movement, around 450 Dutch children annually were dying as a result of car crashes, whereas in the United States of America, that rate is currently

Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World

by Henry Grabar  · 8 May 2023  · 413pp  · 115,274 words

Europe, where car ownership rates were higher, reform had also taken off. In Amsterdam, overrun with traffic in the 1970s, a group of mothers said “Stop de Kindermoord” (“Stop Killing Children”) and started a movement. In 1975, the Netherlands experienced 20 percent more car deaths per capita than the United States; by the