How did a Sunday driving ban imposed by Dutch prime minister Joop den Uyl during the 1973 oil shock quietly turn empty motorways into the seed of 35,000 kilometres of cycle path?

What the ban did was give an entire population a weekly demonstration of what their streets looked like without cars. The campaign that was already waitingThe oil shock did not create Dutch cycling advocacy — it collided with a movement that had been organising for two years. In 1971, 3,300 people had been killed on Dutch roads, of whom more than 400 were children, according to figures compiled by SWOV, the Dutch road-safety research institute. The Dutch cycling network was assembled slowly, in three overlapping waves. What the record supports, and what it does notThe popular telling — that the 1973 oil crisis turned the Netherlands into a cycling country overnight — is not what the archives show.