Comment by Jaxan
3 days ago
It’s good to realise the Dutch cycling infrastructure did not came out of nowhere. There were huge protests in the 70’s about traffic safety. At that time cars ruled the roads and there a lot of accidents, also involving children. From those protests an culture shift started, towards better cycling infrastructure.
There's an excellent documentary about "Stop De Kindermoord" (Stop Killing Our Children)
https://vimeo.com/361286029
There are many reasons why this is unlikely to happen in Poland, but from the top of my head:
-Traffic fatalities have been falling for years now anyway - the 2022 figure per capita is around 20% higher than in the Netherlands, but used to be much, much worse.
-Polish cities are sparsely populated due to adminstrative changes and little of the old architecture surviving the war. Official numbers say that Warsaw has a density of 3.6k/km2, while the runner up is much smaller Białystok with ~2.9k/km2. Most hover in the region of 2.0-2.5k/km2. Real numbers might be different, but it's sparse compared with say Amsterdam's ~5k/km2.
There are plenty of places in the Netherlands with much lower density. They have great cycling and urban design even in tiny towns.
Those are just two out of many points. I stand corrected on the second, but the first holds - road safety has been improving for 20 years now, why bother?
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I do imagine those places benefited from the cultural mindshift originating in dense areas. Just a guess, of course.