ABSTRACT
“A swimming pool attracts more voters than a cycling path. Before you know it, the money has been spent on something else.” Speaking to Dutch MPs in 1991, Public Works minister Hanja Maij-Weggen expressed her doubts that transferring funds to municipalities for cycling would work without strong guarantees: “Provinces and municipalities might then spend the money too easily on different matters. I, too, have worked in a municipality.” 1 But she was also critical of how her predecessor Neelie Smit-Kroes had terminated the national cycling subsidies. On a provincial level, after 1985, “cycling path policy has quite often collapsed.” The country needed a new, national cycling policy with a “booster function” (aanjaagfunctie). 2 Maij-Weggen was suspicious of lower government's commitment to cycling policies: “it would be a sign of overconfidence if I just as merrily [jolig] transferred the funds in question to the provinces and municipalities. After all, last time they did not do the things they were supposed to do with them,” she thought. 3 A role for national governance was called for. It was a remarkable turn of events. Just a few years after the national government had decisively ended its funding role in cycling governance, Maij-Weggen put national cycling governance back on the agenda. After seventy years of government involvement in cycling policies, the policy coalition still had no stable form. It kept changing. How has this developed and stabilized in the thirty years since? Is there a governance equilibrium now?
