Road traffic in the Netherlands: Relatively safe but not safe enough!

The Netherlands—a small, densely populated country in North Western Europe, about as big as Rhode Island—has a population of about 16 million, nearly 135,000 kilometers of paved roads, and about 7 million cars. It has quite a large number of historical city centers that are centuries old. Recently, a music festival was held in one of them, Utrecht. The performances took place on a boat on a canal, and the audience was spread along the walls on either side. There was a wooden stairway connecting the street to a lower path along the moat. A lot of the audience was standing—watching and listening to the performance; there were so many of them that the stairway came loose from the wall and collapsed. Dozens fell into boats under the stairway and in the moat. Ten of them had to be taken to the hospital, and three of them were severely injured. Since then, one of the three had died in hospital from the injuries incurred.