General Assembly 2013

The IFP annual Assembly 2013 shall be held in Munich at the walk21 conference to be held from September 11 to 13.
More information will be posted here later on.

Our New Project

Here we publish news, and we point out the latest amendments on this website

The living end roads project

A project of the International Federation of Pedestrians

With a simple sticker dead-end-streets are changed into living-end-streets, in this case open for pedestrians as well as cyclists.

In Belgium, from now on the municipalities change the dead end signs to make living end signs out of them. (Foto G. van Waeg)

A road that offers no exit for motorized through traffic is often referred to and signed as a dead-end road. However, when such a road continues as a road or path usable by pedestrians or cyclists, we call these “living end roads”. We started a project to correct the old and often misleading signage of living end streets, and developed a sticker that will be put on the current sign.

This project is launched by the Voetgangersbeweging (Pedestrians's movement in Belgium) in cooperation with the municipality of Kampenhout, Belgium, at the end of March 2012. "It's unbelievable that nobody thought about this earlier," said Mayor Jean Meeus of Kampenhout, "So far, people often turned around when they noticed the dead-end sign. Now that we applied those stickers, our people will be triggered to explore our municipality walking or cycling and discover new places. Great initiative! " Also the commissioner for Mobility and Transport Stefaan Peremans is amazed about this the creative solution. "We have recently done a lot of efforts around our network of the “slow roads” (paths and right-of-ways). This project fits nicely in there. More than 80 percent of the “dead end” roads in our area in reality are living end roads. It puts our residents hopefully to more cycling and walking. "

Now that the signs in Kampenhout have been adapted in this pilot project, the Voetgangersbeweging will contact all Belgian municipalities and offer them the possibility to obtain the stickers to adapt their signs. With 27000 signs in Flanders only, and a large portion of them in need of transformation to living end signs, there is some work waiting! But the operation is both simple and relatively cheap, and offers so much value for the active road users, that the expectation is that many municipalities will step into this project.

In the meantime, exploratory contacts have been made with municipalities and IFP member organizations in other countries. This will continue!

Here you find more detailed information about this action. (pdf / 341.7 KB)
... and here a more detailed study on the new signage from Switzerland. (pdf / 915.4 KB)

For more information, please contact:

Geert van Waeg
Vice President
International Federation of Pedestrians
+32 475 66 20 87
geert.vanwaeg@johanna.be

That's the way your country could make the dead end streets come alive as well! (pdf / 494.1 KB)