Melissa Bruntlett

Chris Bruntlett

In Curbing Traffic: The Human Case for Fewer Cars in Our Lives, mobility experts Melissa and Chris Bruntlett chronicle their experience living in the Netherlands and the benefits that result from treating cars as visitors rather than owners of the road. They weave their personal story with research and interviews with experts and Delft locals to help readers share the experience of living in a city designed for people. Their insights will help decision makers and advocates to better understand and communicate the human impacts of low-car cities: lower anxiety and stress, increased independence, social autonomy, inclusion, and improved mental and physical wellbeing. Curbing Traffic provides relatable, emotional, and personal reasons why it matters and inspiration for exporting the low-car city.

The Human Case for Fewer Cars in Our Lives

Curbing Traffic

PG Gonni

A staggering 93 percent of Canadian kids and 80 percent of American kids do not get the recommended hour of daily physical activity. One in three Canadian children are either overweight or obese, a vicious cycle that proves difficult to break as they enter adulthood.

Sadly, most teenagers spend their prime years dependent on others for their transport needs; counting down the days until they qualify for a driver's license. Dutch teens, conversely, spend those years experiencing the freedom and autonomy promised by the car, without its added stress, danger, and expense.

Dutch police actually do very little traffic enforcement. If too many drivers speed on a street, it is deemed a design failure and sent back to the drawing board.

The World Values Survey, which has tracked the degrees of social trust since the early 1980s, has shown the rates in America and Great Britain declining steadily, now at 35 and 30 percent, respectively. The Netherlands, meanwhile, has been trending in the opposite direction and is second only to Norway, with a level of 70 percent.

Dutch engineers consider the existence of a stop sign a design failure. With the right traffic-calming measures, such as raised intersections, continuous footpaths, and lane narrowing, moving within these spaces increases vigilance and awareness, making a stop sign entirely redundant.

Following the election of President Vigdís Finnbogadóttir in 1980 — the first democratically directly elected female leader of any country—the tide was forever changed, not only in representation of women in political leadership but also for the daily lives of Icelandic women. In the decades that followed, full-time, highly subsidized daycare and nine-month paid parental leave (three months for both parents and the rest to be shared between them) became national law

Amazing design approach to proving a concept

Delft was lucky enough to have 75 percent of this network already "on the ground" (either through mixed, traffic-calmed access roads or segregated bike lanes on distributor roads), so the fairly limited funding could be applied in a strategic manner.

In our former lives, we would have thought it wasteful and, quite frankly, bad planning to travel to the shop so often… But with 56 grocery stores within a 30-minute walk of our Delft apartment, we found ourselves buying fresher, more frequently, and in smaller quantities, and our family's health was all the better for it.

If you think of isolation as a form of punishment, and then examine how a lot of people are isolated by virtue of how their cities are designed, you can draw strong connections between urban design and mental health.

Amsterdam’s “We’re not Amsterdam”

"We're not the Mediterranean," seems like a strange retrain in the present-day Netherlands, but at the time, the City's proposal was met with a great deal of skepticism. Sure, France, Spain, and Italy had walking and terrace-sitting cultures, but until then, critics claimed that the Dutch traditionally did not live outside

Curbing Traffic quotes

Join the club