UK vs. Netherlands
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When discussing the early development of the motorway, the names Germany, Italy and America are the three usually discussed. But that misses out on the Netherlands. While the Dutch did not develop motorways before anyone else, they were one of the first countries to embark on large-scale motorway construction right back in the 1930s. Where does that leave them today? Stephen Poley has successfully infiltrated Dutch society and has been living there under cover for twenty years. These are his findings.
"British drivers finding themselves on the Dutch main road network will feel fairly at home compared to some of the countries in this section. Well, apart that is from the minor detail of driving on the other side of the road.
"Matters are rather different in cities, what with trams (trams always have priority) cycle tracks, traffic lights with no repeaters and no red-orange combination, lifting bridges with traffic-lights which have only red (on or off) and a few other things to keep you on your toes.
"This page, however, concentrates on the primary roads."
The Network
The main road network consists of motorways (A-roads, where A stands for Autosnelweg) and other national roads (N-roads). There are also S-roads, or secondary roads, but they are not very often signposted as such.
European roads (E-roads) are sometimes marked, but have a low profile, and the marking seems to have been an afterthought. The Dutch never actually refer to E-roads in conversation, newspaper articles etc., and it's a bit hard to see what purpose E-roads actually serve. In fact the only country which seems to take them seriously is Belgium.
The structure of the Dutch network is quite different to Britain. There are no separate networks of motorways and main roads, but a single network of roads, most of which are now motorways (3268 km of national roads, of which 2346 are motorway - 2004 figures.)
Most primary routes were originally built as motorways or later upgraded to motorways. There is no separate N-road network as such, equivalent to the A-road network in Britain, and few if any cases where an N-road runs parallel to a motorway. There is also really no equivalent to the British B-roads.
The road numbering scheme is mildly eccentric. The single-digit roads have a radial scheme similar to England, with the roads radiating from Amsterdam. However the order of the roads is A1, A2, A4, A5, A9, A8, A7, A6. No I didn't miss the A3 - it doesn't exist. (If you think this is odd, the originally planned order from 1927 was 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 9, 7, 10, with the A6 being a non-radial road.) Other road numbers follow a sort of regional grouping with, for example, most of the 3x numbers in the north-east.
The oddest motorway is the A4, which has three disconnected sections: one from Amsterdam to Den Haag (The Hague), one in Rotterdam, and one running from Bergen op Zoom to the Belgian border near Antwerp. Actually I take that back - the oddest motorway is the A59 from 's Hertogenbosch to Zierikzee. Following this bizarre creation from end to end you have no fewer than five turn-off-to-stay-on junctions, a set of traffic lights where it crosses the A27, and an odd stretch of a few hundred metres near Waalwijk which for no obvious reason is not considered to be motorway.
A Bit of History
The origins of the Dutch national road network go back to Napoleonic times. National roads have since 1813 fallen under the same government agency - Rijkswaterstaat, the highways and waterways authority - a continuity matched by few countries. The first car was driven on Dutch roads in 1896, but a decision as to which side of the road one had to drive on was only taken in 1906!
The road network as it now stands is based on a major network plan drawn up in 1927 (the year after road tax was introduced). The current road network still follows it quite closely, though obviously some roads have been added in densely populated areas, while on the other hand the A3 from Amsterdam to Rotterdam never got built. You might have thought that joining the two largest cities in the country would have priority, but it didn't work out that way.
The Dutch motorway network started much earlier than that in Britain. The first motorway was the A12 from Den Haag (The Hague) to Utrecht. Construction started in 1933, though the first section did not open until 1936. It was the first motorway in the world with hard shoulders. The section from Utrecht to the German border was constructed under German occupation during the war, or at least the foundation was. Dutch delaying-tactics were successful in preventing it from getting finished. After the war the Dutch forgot to stop their delaying-tactics, and the road surfacing was not actually completed until the late 1950's. Parts of it are still almost unchanged today.
Junctions
Folded diamond interchange
The earliest motorways were not surprisingly a bit primitive: narrow carriageways, overpass bridges verging on the hump-backed and most junctions being simple diamonds or variations thereon. The most common variation has all four sliproads on same side of the intersecting road, two of them having very sharp hairpin bends (see photo).
However, recent motorways also persist with simple diamond-based junctions, although at least the hairpins have become less sharp. Only a few of the busiest junctions qualify for roundabouts, while a couple of junctions have recently been rebuilt as (distorted) dumbbells.
Motorway intersections were truly primitive for many years: usually a simple flat roundabout, sometimes even just a set of traffic lights. These sometimes survived for an extraordinarily long time: the A20 on the north side of Rotterdam had a traffic-light controlled crossroads until the mid-1980's, and as mentioned above the A59 still has traffic lights where it crosses the A27. The notorious junction at Deil (A2/A15) remained a simple roundabout until about 1990.
Prins Clausplein
The first cloverleaf did not arrive until 1967 (Badhoevedorp, A4/A9), and it is only very recently that the Dutch have put the four-level stack into operation. The best example of this is the Prins Clausplein near The Hague (see photo).
While the majority of mileage still has two lanes, there is now quite a lot of three-lane motorway, an increasing amount of four-lane, and even a section of five-lane motorway near Schiphol.
A15/A16, Ridderkerk
Pride of place however goes to one of the broadest and busiest pieces of motorway in Europe, which carries the A15 and A16 past Ridderkerk (south-east of Rotterdam). At the point at which this photograph was taken, this piece of quadruple carriageway has a total of 17 lanes plus eight hard shoulders.
Features
The quadruple carriageway is a feature of Dutch motorways near major cities: the Dutch call it a parallel road, which to my mind pretty much fails to describe it. The outer carriageways intersect every junction, while the inner carriageways are intended for through traffic and bypass the less important junctions.
There are no toll-roads as such, but there are a couple of toll-tunnels: the Westerschelde and Dordtse Kil tunnels.
One feature which impresses itself on British visitors, usually in a negative sense when they have to stop for one, is the number of opening bridges in motorways, where they cross waterways.
Heavy use is made of Active Traffic Management: it now covers 42% of the motorways, which must be one of the world's higher percentages.
A rather controversial recent experiment is the use of Spitsstroken. What this means is that the hard shoulder is turned into an extra lane during peak periods. While there were a lot of concerns about safety issues, these don't seemed to have materialised so far.
This last feature is of course triggered by the single feature of Dutch motorways probably most obvious to the driver: traffic jams. The combination of dense population, many rivers and lack of a secondary network of roads equivalent to the British A-roads, mean that the motorways in the west of the country are among the most congested in Europe. On a wet weekday morning, the motorways between Utrecht, The Hague, Rotterdam and Amsterdam are at a crawl over most of their length.
Signs
A major curiosity of the Dutch road network is that signposting was for many years not done by the highway authority at all but by the ANWB, which is the Dutch equivalent of the AA. It's one of those historical accidents which no-one ever got around to correcting.
Recently however signposting was put out to tender, after a political dispute between the ANWB and the government. An amusing tidbit of insider information: it was only after the government had done this that they discovered that the ANWB owned the copyright on the font used for the signs!
Lane designation sign
The colour schemes for signs are:
- white on blue for outside the current gemeente (corresponds roughly to a town or a rural district). Motorways being national roads, they are always considered to be outside any gemeente, so the signs are always white on blue.
- black on white for within the gemeente.
- red on white for cycle paths.
- black on yellow for temporary signs.
Road numbers are given in white-on-red for A-road numbers and black-on-yellow for N-roads. Diagrammatic signs are hardly used.
Old style direction sign with FHWA (American) style typeface
Junction numbers are a recent addition, and are in most places tacked on to existing signs. See the photo here, where the sign for a new housing estate has also been tacked on to the original sign.
Sign clutter
While the Dutch generally try fairly hard to achieve logical and consistent signposting, there does seem to be at least one humourist in the system somewhere - see for example this copse of signposts on a minor road near Rotterdam (above).
In one respect, however, Dutch signposting is poor. That is the matter of long-distance signposting. Nowhere will you find signs to, say, "The North" as you do in Britain. And a bureaucratic rule means that, for example, nowhere in the vicinity of Rotterdam will you find a sign to Amsterdam. This is because signposts are only allowed to show places on the current motorway. And because the motorway from Rotterdam to Amsterdam is labelled A13 for the first 13 kilometres and A4 for the rest, you can't have a sign to Amsterdam! (And you thought the Dutch were sensible people ...)
Engineering
Heinenoord Tunnel
In a country criss-crossed by waterways, it is not surprising to come across a large number of bridges and tunnels. The official Rijkswaterstaat list contains 20 tunnels on the national road system, though some are really just dive-under aqueducts.
The longest tunnel, and most recently opened, is the one under the Westerschelde in the south-west of the country. It is 6.6km long. It is also, at 60 metres below sea-level, the lowest location in the low countries, and I have even seen it claimed as the deepest road tunnel (below sea level) in the world.
The longest bridge is the Zeeland bridge on the N256 connecting the islands of Schouwen-Duiveland and Noord Beveland. It is 5km long, and was for several years the longest bridge in Europe.
Van Brienenoord Bridge, Rotterdam
Perhaps the most impressive is the double steel-arch Van Brienenoord bridge carrying the A16 on the east side of Rotterdam: it carries 12 lanes of traffic plus cycle paths, with a main span of 300 metres.
Haringvliet Sluices
Pride of place for engineering, however, probably goes to the N57, which runs along the coast from Brielle to Middelburg. On its way it crosses (not in this order) the Veerse Gat dam (2.8km), the Brouwers dam (6km), the world's second longest set of sluices over the Haringvliet (3km) and the world's longest set of sluices over the Oosterschelde (62 sluice gates, 6km).
None of these however is the longest water crossing in the Netherlands. This title goes to the Afsluitdijk: the immense dam in the extreme north of the country which converted the tidal Zuyderzee into the fresh-water Ijsselmeer. It is about 30km long, of which 22km is dead straight and level, and was completed as long ago as 1932.
So if you're wanting to do a tour of Europe's most impressive road engineering, the Netherlands should certainly be included on the itinerary!
Photographs of Prins Clausplein (image 3) and aerial photograph of folded diamond junction (image 2) reproduced from Rijkswaterstaat Geo Nieuws 2006-1 with permission.
