Afraid of cycling home alone? You don’t have to during TOP Week.
Cycling home alone in the dark, in a strange city? Especially for first-year students who dread the idea, the municipality of Tilburg, in collaboration with TOP Week, is introducing Safe Tilly End. The idea is simple but clever: cycling together is safer than cycling alone.
Starting Tuesday evening during TOP Week, six trees on Piusplein, next to McDonald’s, will be illuminated in different colors. Each color represents a Tilburg neighborhood. Park your bike near the color of your neighborhood and you’ll find traveling companions heading the same way when your night out is over.
Pink cyclists will head towards Blaak, red is for Broekhoven, orange points to Korvel, blue means North, yellow means West, and those who choose green will ride with fellow students towards Reeshof.
Safely home
A cheerful display of light, but with a serious message: as a new student in Tilburg, you don’t have to feel alone or unsafe, neither in the pub nor on your way home.
The initiative addresses a pressing problem that particularly affects young women. Recent figures from Statistics Netherlands (CBS) show that almost half of women between the ages of 15 and 25 sometimes deliberately choose a different route because they feel unsafe. Police receive the most reports of street harassment, especially at night.
Tackling Street Harassment
According to Jenny Janssens, inclusion policy officer at the municipality of Tilburg, the campaign aligns with a broader focus on safety in the city: ‘In Tilburg, we take tackling street harassment very seriously. With Safe Tilly End, we hope to promote social safety. This way, you don’t have to cycle home alone, and you also get to know fellow students who live nearby.’
If, despite everything, things still go wrong on the street, in the pub, or elsewhere during TOP Week, Janssens has a few practical tips: ‘Ask if someone is okay if you see them being harassed, contact a security guard or law enforcement officer if you need help, or report it through our hotline.’
