§Series II · 01 · Form
The Illusion of Capacity
Scarcity as a self-built cage without a lock
The polder that wasn’t full
In a polder of eighteen thousand hectares, with one hundred sixty-five thousand inhabitants and a population density below the Dutch average, I heard during my time as cluster manager Spatial Planning almost weekly that the polder was full. Full for housing, full for logistics, full for energy, full for aviation-related business, full for recreation, full for agricultural scaling. The full-claim was carried by a coalition of Schiphol restrictions, noise contours, external safety, National-Landscape classification, Park 21 aspirations, MRA negotiation dynamics, provincial spatial bylaws, Green Heart border-effect, and local administrators with constituent interests. None of those actors held a mandate over the cumulative outcome, and the outcome was that a polder of eighteen thousand hectares in the heart of the densest housing demand of the Netherlands functioned as virtually closed off in spatial terms. On every map that lay on the desk, thousands of hectares of the same monotonous agricultural parcelling were visible.
On another desk in the same municipality lay a microgrid analysis for one of the business parks. The site had been declared full by the network operator. No new connections possible, no room for expanding existing contracts, no connection capacity for planned sustainability investments. The analysis, prepared by an independent consultancy commissioned by a group of entrepreneurs on the site, showed that the existing connection was sufficient for all businesses and considerably more, provided that on a handful of peak moments per week something was scaled back and usage was coordinated. A storage battery, a few agreements about peak distribution, and the site could continue building. The figures were striking. At virtually every moment of the week between thirty and fifty percent of the contracted capacity sat unused on the transformer.
Two dossiers in the same municipality, two full-claims, two different policy apparatuses, identical mechanism. The polder was not full because there were no more square meters. The transformer was not full because no more electrons could flow. Both were declared full because the system that registered their availability could not coordinate their use and could not flatten their peaks. The full-claim was procedural, not physical. And the citizen who lives in this polder, who stands on this A4 motorway, who waits on this rail corridor, or who lives in this nitrogen zone, does not experience the difference between procedural and physical. To the citizen, full is simply full.
This paper opens the Statecraft series Reverberation with the proposition that the Dutch full-claim in its most important public domains is not a reflection of physical reality but a deposit of an institutional condition. Full is what society retains from the fragmented governance that an earlier Statecraft series diagnosed as the dissociated organisation. The five domains addressed in this paper, electricity, mobility, rail, space and nitrogen, all display the same grammar. Capacity is not scarce. Concurrency is scarce, and the administrative architecture is structurally not designed to influence that concurrency.
The difference between capacity and concurrency
A standard Dutch new-build home typically receives a connection of three by twenty-five amperes, which translates to seventeen point twenty-five kilowatts of maximum available power.¹ An average household consumes around two thousand five hundred kilowatt-hours per year, which corresponds to an average continuous power draw of just under three hundred watts. The ratio of contracted capacity to average consumption is therefore about sixty to one. At a normal peak moment, with cooking, washing machine and possibly EV charger running together, you reach three to five kilowatts, about one fifth of contracted capacity. Almost never does a household come close to the maximum of even the heaviest residential connection.
Apply this calculation to neighbourhood scale and the same mechanism appears at larger scope. A neighbourhood of five hundred homes has on paper a contracted capacity of roughly eight and a half megawatts. The actual concurrent peak of that neighbourhood, even on a cold winter evening with everyone home, stays below two megawatts. Network operators formally use a concurrency factor of around zero point four for residential connections, and in practice even that is on the high side of what consumption actually shows.²
Here lies the first regularity. Capacity and concurrency are not the same. A connection is dimensioned on contracted peak, not on actual usage pattern. A physical network is dimensioned on the cumulative peak of all connections combined, not on actual concurrent usage. And between those two dimensionings and actual usage lie factors of two to five, in some domains up to ten.
The second regularity is that concurrency is steerable and capacity is not. Whoever wants more capacity must build, dig, lay, asphalt or permit, with all the corresponding lead times of five to fifteen years. Whoever wants to flatten concurrency can do so with dynamic tariffs, storage, behavioural incentives, organisational coordination and technical control within one to three years, at a fraction of the cost and without physical intervention. Both solution paths lie open. The Dutch administrative architecture chooses almost automatically for the first, because its institutions are organised around capacity expansion and not around concurrency steering.
Here lies the central mechanism of the illusion of capacity. What is presented as capacity shortage is in virtually all cases a coordination problem. And the coordination problem is not solved because no institutional actor holds a mandate over concurrency as an independent question. The network operator is responsible for physical infrastructure, the regulator for tariffs, the customer for his own contract, and the neighbourhood, site or corridor coordination that connects them is not an institutional role but an exception track.
Five domains, one grammar
The electricity grid
In 2026, grid congestion is the most documented domain in which the difference between capacity and concurrency is empirically visible. TenneT and the regional network operators report congestion zones where no new connections are possible and where existing contracts can no longer be expanded.³ At the same time, measurements of actual usage in those congestion zones show that the cumulative peak only approaches a level at which capacity scarcity occurs for two to three hours per day. The residential load curve shows a main peak between six and nine in the evening, with the actual top between six and seven when cooking, washing machines, dryers, showers, lighting and the cumulative charging of bicycles and cars coincide. Outside that window the grid runs largely at one third to half of its capacity.
The congestion management arrangement that the Dutch competition authority introduced in 2022 and which entered operational use from 2024, is precisely intended to address this concurrency question. It is already applied at several dozen locations with measurable results. What is missing is not the instrument but its standardisation as the first-line solution rather than as exception track. A business park currently encountering congestion must wrestle through a procedural pathway to reach congestion management, while the standard path should be that congestion management is the first response and grid expansion only follows. The Haarlemmermeer microgrid finding is in that light not a technological breakthrough. It is the empirical confirmation of a calculation every energy engineer has been making for a decade, and the administrative outcome is that despite this it is not arranged as the standard path.
The Dutch motorway
Traffic engineers have known since Bruce Greenshields in 1934 that a motorway has a capacity of around two thousand two hundred vehicles per lane per hour at free flow at one hundred twenty kilometres per hour. Up to about eighty percent of that capacity, the flow remains robust. Beyond that it becomes metastable, and at ninety to ninety-five percent it tips into stop-and-go through a mechanism known as the phantom traffic jam. The tipping is not the failure of an individual driver, it is a system property. One small braking action in a densely loaded lane reverberates backwards as a shockwave, and the capacity of the road in jam condition falls back from two thousand two hundred to roughly fifteen hundred to seventeen hundred vehicles per hour. The jam thus lengthens itself.⁴
What has become visible after the pandemic, and what was not foreseen in earlier mobility planning, is that working from home has not flattened the commuter peak but shifted and concentrated it. British and American policy circles call this the TWaT phenomenon, after Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday. In the Netherlands, however, Wednesday is skipped because of the combination of fathers’ day off, mothers’ day off, and the Wednesday-afternoon-free school culture that exists in this form in no other country. The Dutch commuter peak concentrates on Tuesday and Thursday, with a net load that is structurally higher than the average pre-pandemic working day. A two-day peak on a narrower grid than before the pandemic, not a five-day peak with spreading as policy had expected.⁵
What this diagnosis lacks is not solutions. The obvious mechanisms have been known for years. Spreading of departure times via employer policy, briefly demonstrated workable under COVID and then, unorganised, fell back. Pricing by moment of use via congestion charging, in some form operationalised in virtually every comparable European country, in the Netherlands locked for twenty years in a political pas-de-deux. Hybrid work that genuinely dampens the peak but is not consolidated as policy. Modal shift to public transport on corridors where this is realistic, with the Hoofddorp-The Hague axis as precisely a corridor where Sprinter and Intercity could largely take over the A4 peak if reliability and capacity were on order. None of these solutions requires asphalt. None of them is technically impossible. What is missing is the administrative architecture in which coordination is organised as the standard path rather than as exception.
The rail network
Rail is the most painful variant because it should in principle be the instrument that relieves the A4 and in practice follows the same grammar. Dutch rail capacity on the heavy corridors, in particular Amsterdam-Utrecht, Schiphol-The Hague and Utrecht-Den Bosch, is concentrated in the peak at six to ten trains per hour per direction, dropping to two to four in off-peak hours. Peak crowding on Tuesday and Thursday is structurally higher than on the other days, and the experience of a full railway is registered by passengers at exactly the moments when capacity is also fully used. ProRail has been reporting since 2010 that capacity on the A2 corridor and at the junctions Utrecht Central, Amsterdam South and Schiphol is at its ceiling. The High-Frequency Rail Programme has been running since 2010 to solve this, with adjustments to signalling via ERTMS, four-tracking where possible, and frequency increases on core corridors. The execution has been ongoing for fifteen years and is in 2026 not yet completed.⁶
At the same time, off-peak hours stand largely empty, with trains running at occupancy rates of twenty to thirty percent on exactly the same infrastructure that is overburdened in peak. Average daily utilisation of an arbitrary Dutch rail line for most corridors lies below forty percent. Main capacity and main use coincide in two to three hours per day. The rest is empty.
The spatial full-claim
The CBS Land Use 2022 dataset reports that of the more than four million hectares of Dutch surface area, fifty-two percent is agricultural terrain. Less than a tenth of the Netherlands consists of built terrain. Specifically for housing it lies around seven percent. Add transport infrastructure and all other built area, and you arrive at the so-called red space of about fourteen percent. The remaining eighty-five percent is agricultural, water, nature, forest and recreation.⁷
The arithmetic for the housing target makes this even sharper. Nine hundred thousand homes by 2030, at an average density of thirty homes per hectare, occupy thirty thousand hectares, or about zero point seven percent of the Netherlands. With a more spacious neighbourhood layout of thirteen to fifteen homes per hectare, which corresponds to the PBL definition of the small extension principle, it rises to one to one and a half percent. That is the entire housing target by 2030, expressed in land surface. A country that experiences this as spatial impossibility lives in a different mathematics from its own map.
The Green Heart is here a textbook example of what a spatial-planning fiction can become when it is repeated in policy long enough. The term was coined in urbanist circles in the 1950s and formalised in the Second Memorandum on Spatial Planning of 1966, at a moment when the Randstad still genuinely was a ring around a relatively empty middle area. That middle area has changed essentially in sixty years through the population growth of Alphen, Woerden, Bodegraven, Boskoop, Gouda, Nieuwkoop and the intermediate settlements, cut by A2, A4, A12, A20 and the Betuweroute freight line, plus the associated industrial estates, glasshouses and logistics complexes. What remains is principally intensified dairy farming on subsiding peat soil that slowly compacts through drainage. It is not a heart, it is not green in the ecological sense, and it is not a contiguous area. What it is, is a formally protected name that makes every spatial intervention within a perimeter of one hundred ninety-five thousand hectares legally and politically extra heavy.
Not all landscape protection is fiction. The Wadden Sea, the dunes, the high moor remnants, the old forests around Drenthe and the Achterhoek, the river floodplains, these are ecological assets of irreplaceable value. The NIMBY claim must therefore be precisely delineated to what it concerns. The defence of agricultural monoculture as landscape, the protection of suburban views over meadow, the blocking of expansion around villages that in fact ask for growth, the procedural weighting that makes every building intervention a planning damages risk. That is NIMBY in landscape mask. The protection of what is genuinely ecologically irreplaceable is unassailable, and that lies for the most part not in the locations where the housing target would have impact.
The nitrogen balance
What came into motion in 2019 with the ruling of the Council of State, and what in subsequent years has acquired its legal and operational form in permitting freezes, the PAS ruling, the critical deposition value system and the AERIUS calculation, carries the same grammar.⁸ The physical reality of nitrogen deposition is a dynamic phenomenon that varies strongly across time, space and emission sources. Its legally binding registration is static, based on critical deposition values per habitat, and measured on calendar-year basis. What is in reality a handful of peak moments per year, on which a specific combination of weather conditions, wind and land use leads to local exceedance, is registered by the system as annual-average exceedance of a habitat that as a whole sits outside the bandwidth.
The permitting outcome is therefore that nitrogen space is called full while in reality on ninety-three to ninety-six percent of moments in the year sufficient absorption capacity is available to permit the requested activity. The link between static registration and dynamic reality is absent. The instruments to make that link, for example via dynamic permitting, controlled emission management, regional alignment of peak moments and conditional permitting based on actual deposition, are conceptually available but institutionally impenetrable. The permitting authority holds no mandate over this coordination. The applicant has no vehicle to organise it. The provinces and the central government each have their own column responsibility that is not organised around concurrency.
The housing target
Housing is the most visible aggregate of the other four domains, because it is constrained by all four simultaneously. The grid cannot connect the neighbourhood because it is called full, while in reality it is at its ceiling for two hours a day. The A4 cannot absorb commuter traffic because it is called full, while it is at peak for five days a week and empty for the remaining twenty hours. Space is locked because it is called full, while fifty-two percent of the Netherlands is agricultural and a small one percent would be enough to deliver the entire target. Nitrogen space is exceeded because it is called full, while that exceedance is an annually aggregated figure that does not do justice to actual deposition dynamics.
Here the small-extension discussion reaches its full reach. The concept originates from the Economic Institute for the Construction Industry, was named by then-Minister De Jonge in his Parliamentary letter of 6 June 2024 as a policy option, and has been calculated by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency at a potential of ninety-five thousand homes spread over more than twenty-one hundred settlements, at a maximum of forty-nine homes per settlement at a density of fifteen homes per hectare.⁹ Mona Keijzer’s Draft Memorandum on Space of September 2025 raised it to one hundred homes per settlement. If the concept is to truly meet the housing target, you are not talking about a small street and not about a small district. Nine hundred thousand homes spread over around two thousand settlements yield four hundred twenty to five hundred homes per settlement. That is a neighbourhood at Bhalotra scale, not a small street at parcel scale. And that is precisely what was achievable in Berlage’s Plan-South of 1917 and in Bhalotra’s Kattenbroek of 1988, and what is no longer possible under the current procedural regime.
What the citizen experiences and what the apparatus registers
Across all five domains we see the same mechanism. The citizen experiences full as physical impossibility. He stands in the traffic jam, he gets no connection, he cannot buy a home, he sees the farmer drowning in a permitting regime, he sees the waiting list growing for the public transport corridor he would want to use daily. To the citizen, full is a fact of life, and his offer of his own connection, his own ride, his own housing need, his own entrepreneurship or his own mobility feels like the supplier asking too much of an exhausted system.
The apparatus experiences the same phenomenon differently. To the apparatus, full is a procedural outcome of a correctly executed measurement methodology. The network operator has measured the transformer and compared the cumulative contracted capacity to the physical conducting capacity. The road authority has measured peak intensity and compared it to road capacity. The permitting authority has measured the critical deposition value and compared it to current deposition. In each of these cases the measurement is formally correct, and in each of these cases the outcome is that none of those actors has a measurement of the concurrency where the actual bottleneck sits, and none of them holds a mandate to influence that concurrency.
The difference between what the citizen experiences and what the apparatus registers is the core finding of doorwerking. The dissociated organisation does not produce a full-claim as deliberate outcome. It produces it as by-product of how it measures, registers and permits. The full-claim is the residue of a governance mode in which concurrency does not exist as a category. And precisely because it is not a category, it cannot be addressed as a problem. The apparatus responds to full with capacity expansion, because capacity is a category. That the solution lies in coordination and not in capacity is not operationalisable within the existing architecture.
Here lies the core doorwerking. Institutional dissociation produces in society an experience of physical scarcity at exactly the locations where no physical scarcity exists. It then forces policy and investment in the direction of capacity expansion, because society registers this as legitimate response to its full-experience. And it weakens in the meantime the knowledge base and administrative space in which concurrency steering could be developed as alternative. It is a self-reproducing mechanism. The full-claim creates the call for more asphalt, more cable, more stone and more permitted hectares. That call burdens the procedural apparatuses that produced the original full-claim. And concurrency steering is never installed as standard path, because it has no natural position in any of the strengthened procedures.
The red contour as abandoned justification
The spatial domain deserves its own deepening because it illustrates how an instrument can outlive its rationale and nevertheless persist in its legal form. The red contour was introduced as a national instrument in the Fifth Memorandum on Spatial Planning (Pronk, 2001), which incidentally was never definitively adopted. The Memorandum on Space (Dekker, 2004) largely struck the national instrument again, after which various provinces — notably Utrecht and Zuid-Holland — adopted it in their own provincial spatial ordinances. At that time it was a defensible response to the suburban sprawl of the 1970s and 1980s and to the visual clutter around the Randstad. The reasoning was threefold and rational in itself. Compact building would optimise public-transport accessibility and service levels, the Green Heart and the National Landscape would be preserved, and the administrative demarcation would simplify spatial procedures.
What has happened over thirty-five years is that the instrument has outlived its rationale. Compact building has bought the affordability crisis in the Randstad. The Green Heart is largely conserved as agricultural production landscape without notable nature gain. And the simplification has reversed into its opposite in that every deviation now produces an administrative-law battle. The Strengthening Housing Direction Bill — submitted in March 2024 and passed by the House of Representatives in July 2025 — aims to disapply the Sustainable Urbanisation Ladder for housing, to deregulate building outside urban areas. The bill is still before the Senate in spring 2026, with intended entry into force on 1 July 2026. This removes the instrument without replacement of the substantive consideration it tried to organise. What takes its place is precisely what the dissociated organisation always produces. An implicit outcome, a procedural void that will fill itself with arbitrary individual decisions without cumulative coherence.
Here the doorwerking analysis touches its specific historical bedding. Dutch spatial planning has built up over sixty years a series of procedural instruments, each with its own rationale, each added in its own period, and the sum is a procedural matrix that no longer serves its original goals and no longer corrects its own internal workings. It is not the failure of any individual instrument. It is the doorwerking of the institutional configuration in which no actor governs its coherence.
Way forward: coordination as standard path
The full-claim is not an inescapable outcome. It is an institutional outcome, and institutional outcomes can be redesigned. Four directions present themselves.
The first direction is operational. In each of the five domains a validated coordination technique exists that can be installed as first-line solution rather than as exception track. Congestion management for electricity, dynamic pricing and peak avoidance for mobility, frequency optimisation and off-peak incentivisation for rail, dynamic permitting on actual deposition for nitrogen, and the small-extension typology at genuine scale for space. The technique is in each case available. What is missing is its standardisation as first-line solution. For each of the five domains an implementation rule can be designed in which the coordination approach is the standard path and capacity expansion the derivative.
The second direction is institutional. In virtually no domain does an institutional position exist for coordination as an independent question. The network operator governs cables, not usage behaviour. The road authority governs asphalt, not working hours. The permitting authority governs moments of testing, not actual behaviour over time. What is missing is an institutional role explicitly responsible for concurrency, with mandate over the coordinating instruments in its domain. That need not be a new organisation, it can be a competence extension of existing actors, provided it is explicit and enforceable.
The third direction is informational. Concurrency scarcity is only visible in time-bound data, and most public registration systems measure cumulatively and annually aggregated. A transition to real-time or near-real-time public measurement systems, with open data on actual utilisation per moment of day, week and year, would supply the empirical basis on which coordination as standard path becomes rationally defensible. The relevant sensor infrastructure already exists for electricity (smart meters), largely for mobility (traffic sensors, public-transport data), partly for rail and in incomplete form for nitrogen. What is missing is its consolidation into one publicly available concurrency picture per domain.
The fourth direction is administrative. The full-claim is produced by different columns simultaneously, and it is only dismantleable through intervention at the level of those columns jointly. That is precisely where the dissociated organisation shows its greatest resistance. No column gives up mandate, no ministry concedes its coordination authority, and no regulator is competent to judge over coherence. Here lies the actual statecraft question. Not which instruments can be introduced, but which administrative architecture can be designed in which coordination becomes the first-line response and column responsibility the derivative.
In chapters nine and ten of De Richting van de Beweging I work this out as the Aiki application to institutional design. Not more regulation, not pushing harder against existing frameworks, but redirecting the energy of the system so that collective coordination becomes the first-line response and individual expansion the derivative. That is administratively not impossible, but it is a different design from the current one. What this Statecraft paper adds is that the three cases of space, electricity and mobility together, with rail and nitrogen as parallel illustrations, supply the empirical backbone with which that principle does not need to be presented as methodological claim, but as logical consequence of the facts as they lie.
Position in the Reverberation series
This paper opens the Statecraft series Reverberation. The series consists of eight documents in three groups. Five form-papers each document a separate domain in which the institutional dissociation of the Dutch executive government lands in the private life of citizens. Two signature essays describe mechanisms that work through all five forms. One synthesis chapter describes the cumulative deposit at societal level.
This paper is the first form. The silent expropriation (paper 02) documents the doorwerking on ownership structure, building on The pattern The Hague does not see. The remediless citizen (paper 03) documents the doorwerking on individual legal position and builds on the recovery-operations analysis in Recovery State Netherlands. The pressure on the weakest (paper 04) documents the doorwerking via money flows between budget holders that selectively land on those least able to organise counter-force. The vanishing fabric (paper 05) documents the doorwerking on community and connects to the work in Allemaal Ontheemd.
Between these five forms work the two signature essays. Blind to the known future (paper 06) names the institutional blindness towards futures the apparatus has long known, with the demographic curve of ageing as main case. Behind on speed (paper 07) names the tempo asymmetry between exogenous technological, ecological and geopolitical developments and institutional response speed. The synthesis chapter The congealed Zeitgeist (paper 08) brings the five forms and two signatures together in a diagnosis of the cumulative societal deposit.
The five forms, two signatures and synthesis together supply the external symptomatology of what an earlier Statecraft series diagnosed as the dissociated organisation. The internal symptoms within the apparatus are addressed there. The external doorwerking, what society experiences of that organisational condition, forms the subject of this second series.
Position in the corpus
The corpus in which this series sits has four layers. The handbook De Richting van de Beweging: Interim-Management in de Publieke Sector (manuscript in preparation, 2026) describes the practice layer, with chapter nine setting out anchoring as the primary KPI of interim work, and chapters nine and ten developing the Aiki application to institutional design: not pushing harder against existing frameworks, but redirecting the energy of the system so that collective coordination becomes the first-line response and individual expansion the derivative. Statecraft describes the institutional layer, of which this paper is one elaboration. Allemaal Ontheemd describes the human layer of the loss of belonging and biographical continuity. Decline and Revival describes the civilisational time layer, with the contemporary Dutch stagnation as repetition of the pattern E.J. Potgieter named in 1841 as the Jan Salie mentality.
What this paper contributes is the empirical backbone with which the Aiki proposition does not need to be presented as methodological claim, but as logical consequence of the facts as they lie. The five domains of space, electricity, mobility, rail and nitrogen, together addressed in this paper, are each full-claims that on closer examination read as coordination problems, not capacity problems. What the citizen experiences as physical impossibility is what the apparatus produces as by-product of its registration methodology. The self-built cage without a lock.
Colophon
Jacob Huibers is an interim manager with over twenty years of experience in the Dutch public sector. He worked as cluster manager, cluster director and quartermaster in municipalities ranging from fifty thousand to over two hundred thousand inhabitants and in regional cooperative arrangements in the social and physical domains, including a period as cluster manager Spatial Planning in Haarlemmermeer. Statecraft is his platform for strategic reflection on public execution.
Contact and subscription: Statecraft.nl/en/contact
Statecraft is the publication platform of Jacob Huibers for strategic reflection on Dutch public execution. Earlier papers in the Statecraft series are available at statecraft.nl. Response and rebuttal are welcome via Statecraft.nl/en/contact.
Note on translation. The Dutch term doorwerking is retained in the English text where it functions as a technical term of the series. It denotes the working-through of an institutional condition into the lived experience of those subject to it: stronger than ‘effect’, more specific than ‘consequence’, and not equivalent to either. Where the term appears as part of a diagnosis or argument, it is left in its Dutch form. Where it functions descriptively, it has been rendered as ‘working through’ or as ‘effect’ depending on context.
Footnotes
¹ Stedin, Aansluitingen voor woning of bedrijfspand, April 2026; Enexis Netbeheer, Welke aansluiting heb ik nodig. A three-phase connection of 3 x 25A at 230V supplies a maximum of 17,250 watts peak power. For a 1x35A connection, common in older existing housing, the maximum is 8,050 watts.
² Calculated on the basis of Netbeheer Nederland, Capaciteitskaart elektriciteit, 2025, and CBS, Energieverbruik particuliere woningen 2024. The standard concurrency factor of 0.4 for residential connections is based on cumulative models that in practice overestimate actual concurrent usage.
³ TenneT, Capaciteitskaart en jaarverslag transportcapaciteit, 2025; ACM, Codebesluit congestiemanagement, from 2022; Netbeheer Nederland, Investeringsplan 2024-2033.
⁴ Greenshields, B.D., A Study of Traffic Capacity, 1934; Treiber, M., Hennecke, A. and Helbing, D., “Congested traffic states in empirical observations and microscopic simulations”, Physical Review E 62 (2000), 1805-1824. For Dutch data, see Rijkswaterstaat, Capaciteit en doorstroming op het hoofdwegennet, annual reporting.
⁵ Bloom, N. and Davis, S., Stanford WFH Project, Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes, 2020-2025; Kennisinstituut voor Mobiliteitsbeleid, Kerncijfers Mobiliteit 2025.
⁶ ProRail, Programma Hoogfrequent Spoorvervoer voortgangsrapportages 2010-2025; Ministerie van Infrastructuur en Waterstaat, Voortgangsbrief PHS.
⁷ CBS, Bodemgebruik 2022, press release 6 March 2026: “The Netherlands has a surface area of more than 4 million hectares. More than half (52 percent) is in use as agricultural terrain. Less than one tenth of the Netherlands consists of built terrain.” Compendium voor de Leefomgeving, Kaart bodemgebruik van Nederland 2017 and update 2022.
⁸ Council of State, ruling on the Programmatic Approach to Nitrogen, 29 May 2019, ECLI:NL:RVS:2019:1603; Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality, Stikstofaanpak 2020-2025.
⁹ Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, Straatje erbij: een ruimtelijke analyse, September 2024; Parliamentary letter Voortgang grootschalige woningbouw, 6 June 2024 (De Jonge); Ontwerp-Nota Ruimte, September 2025 (Keijzer).