Tam On Transit

I woke up with a plan, a very good plan, to take every form of non-automobile transport easily available in Amsterdam. Bike to Rijkmuseum Bike to the bookstore district  Take the ferry from behind Central Station  Bike around Noord Amsterdam  Ride Metro back with my bike before rush hour  Drop my bike at the hostel Take a bus out Take a tram back What I actually did: Slept in too late for the art museum Biked to the bookstores Ferried to Noord Amsterdam  Biked up through Noord to a Metro station ...and realized I missed the last train before rush hour that would allow bikes on board. So, I biked around Noord Amsterdam neighborhoods for the rest of the day, ended up at a light industrial waterfront area that had been redeveloped into design offices, restaurants, and what I think of as "the usual" attempts to spruce up an old port or industrial area to attract high income people to work and visit in an area to spend mo

Planning for Urban Mobility and Accessibility, aka PUMA Dr. Meredith Glaser, Director of the Urban Cycling Institute housed at the University of Amsterdam, developed the PUMA game as a learning tool. I really enjoyed the structure of the game. It followed a basic scavenger hunt concept with the addition of varying points to make some items/activities more valuable for people who enjoy competition as a motivation. The geographic framework of PUMA uses the urban typologies of old city urban, pre-WWII suburban, and post-WWII suburban (These can be thought of city areas built before trains, old suburbs built after trains/streetcars, and new suburbs built during and after a large push to favor car travel.) The activities varied from watching (observing) to chatting with people (interviewing) to mimicking a local's daily route (experiencing).  Central city (the poles enable moving big household things) Pre-WWII suburb (community waste boxes are infested too!) Post

The day kicked off with a bike tour led by Marjolein de Lange of Fietserbond, the cyclists' union. (Yes, the bicyclists union is real there, not just a cheeky Twitty account.) I took away three main concepts. 1) "A bike policy is not something you do once."  Efforts to increase the safety, ease, and appeal of cycling in Amsterdam tracked back to a 1978 network map vision. Though much of that original proposal now exists, policy shifts started in earnest after building larger political will in the 1980's. Infrastructure policy continued and continues to shift with time as the understanding of possibilities grow, findings of analysing pre- and post-intervention inform future planning, and travel behaviors adjusted to the shifting infrastructure. For example, the fear of being hit while biking and ending up maimed or killed by a car driver led to the intervention of separate bike tracks. The popularity of the network of bike tracks (along with parallel interv

Though I left early, I still managed to miss the office door for our morning meeting so many times that I arrived late for Chris Bruntlett of Dutch Cycling Embassy lecture. Luckily, I've followed his work off and on via Twitter for several years so I knew the backstory. One of the bonuses of Chris's talk was that he covered some of the history and turning points in the Netherlands' path toward making biking for everyday needs am everyday reality. Similar to Connie's explanation of Odense, Denmark finding itself in a car-based conundrum after destroying neighborhoods for city-intruding highways, Utrecht, Netherlands had had its own expensive blunder. They filled in part of a canal to build a mall connected to the central train station and constructed a (very short) portion of city-averse highway. Having the wherewithal to admit the mistake and pay to fix it severe decades later, Utrecht reopened the canal, revamped the shopping mall, built the largest bike parking garage

We met with the board chair of the European Cyclists' Federation, Henk Swarttouw, to learn more about how bicycling advancements work at the EU level. While the Dutch approach to cycling as a normal part of transportation, rather than viewing it as an "alternative" transportation, exists in their own forms and histories in other countries of the EU (such as parts of Denmark and Germany), expanding infrastructure to increase the utility and ease of cycling varies widely across the union. When a country or region within a country wants advice on network design, they sometimes turn to the European Cyclists' Federation for guidance.  The European Cyclists' Federation also works as advocates at various levels. At the EU level, the ECF works to improve cycling across all of the union. For example, they try for policy to ensure that biking and rail connect networks and work together. They also work on tax policy that would categorize bikes as basic needs. Whe

It's a bit startling how easily people can get around here in the Netherlands. Short distances or long distances, we can move about without a ton of planning.  We met up with Bradley Tollison, a former participant of this learning abroad program, at the Driebergen-Zeist train station to learn more about how cycling complements transit more than it competes. When a region makes an ongoing effort to make a less-car life a real possibility, it pays attention to human behavior. In the Netherlands, the city planners noticed that a large portion of bike trips went to or from trains.  (Photo from Cuijk Station near Nijmegen) Turns out, people living in Denmark can participate in a program where they use the same card as the train trips for a bike share bike. So, they can bike to the train (possibly on their own bike), park it, take the train, then borrow an OV fiets (bike) to complete the journey on the other end. I'd noticed these bikes at the stations near Nijmegen (like