LEIDEN – Leiden wants to be the cycling city of the Netherlands, but meanwhile reports of bicycle accidents continue to pile up. The Leiden/Leiderdorp Audit Office is now trying to untangle this with an investigation into whether the municipal bicycle safety policy actually works. The presentation of the research design offered the council committee a fine glimpse into the political urge to cycle everyone’s personal hobbyhorse into such a report.
The Audit Office solemnly speaks of “added value” and a “risk-based approach”: lots of data, models and comparisons with other university towns. Councillor Cato Weggen (SVL) wants to know exactly what this adds beyond the expertise of existing traffic-safety experts. “Where is the added value, where is the new angle?” she asks, before adding a slightly embarrassed, “That sounded very odd, critical, sorry.”
What the investigation will not become: a shopping list of where the next speed camera should be installed.
Yet that is precisely what others are hoping for. Councillor IJsbrand Olthof (D66) pointedly asks about enforcement and preferred “enforcement methods” and wants to know whether temporary speed cameras after serious accidents might emerge as a recommendation. The researchers temper expectations: they will speak with enforcement officers, but they are not writing prescriptions for speed-camera placement. Olthof also brings up Katwijk, where right-of-way rules on roundabouts are exactly the opposite of those in Leiden. Will these local discrepancies—and the confusion they cause—be included? An interesting question, the Audit Office says, but “likely not visible in the investigation.”
Other factions load the investigation with more wishes. Kirsten Schuil (PvdD) presses for attention to behaviour in traffic and campaigns such as “Traffic is a team sport.” Marleen Schreuder (GroenLinks) wants to know whether gender and other risk groups appear in the models, and what happens with residents who have been warning about a dangerous roundabout for years, Schuil adds. This ultimately yields a clear “no”: no separate gender line, residents involved but not as an independent research theme. Bicycle-parking congestion in places like the Pelikaanhof? At most weighed as an “obstacle” in the infrastructure.
Meanwhile another councillor, Abdullah Al-Awwadi (PvdA), grumbles that the presentation is coming “only now,” even though the investigation started in September. The Audit Office calmly emphasises its own added value: integrated, data-driven, scientifically grounded.
Thus, in barely half an hour, a familiar Leiden scene emerges: the council dreams of swift, visible interventions, the Audit Office of careful calculations. If they manage to meet somewhere in the middle, that safe cycling city might yet materialise—speed camera or not.
