Tam On Transit

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...

One word for the awesomeness of this day: multimodal. Heck yes, dear reader, we used several types of transportation in one day!  We rode our countryside bikes to the train station.  We took the Stoptrein train to (somewhere), which honestly felt more like a light rail train. We transferred in a mere 6 minutes  to our train to Utrecht.  We hauled our luggage about a half mile, a good portion of which went through a very well designed mall, to our StayOkay hostel in central Utrecht. Then we met Ronald, who took us on a walking tour to pick up our in-city rental bikes. Y'all. Y'ALL. I was tired but also geeking out over how seamless it was!  But wait! There's more! We repeated a prior assignment from Copenhagen, Denmark in the new-to-us context of Utrecht, Netherlands. We followed locals on their commutes for about an hour before meeting in Wilhelmina Park to debrief. The experience was very different than anywh...

That knee I tweaked not running over a child in Copenhagen? Well, it wasn't about to pedal another kilometer. I missed out on the converted railway right of way trail (aka rail to trail) bike ride from Korinth to Odense as a result. On the flip side--I had a multimodal transit day! I took a bus from Korinth, transfered to a train, and took the train to Odense. I purchased the ticket on the app and away I went. My first bus stop was a rather unassuming pole. It had useful things like a schedule and trash can (though the can needed emptied). For such a small town, the addition of the schedule was quite nice. The bus arrived on time. Onboard was a fellow classmate who had a minor tumble after starting the day on a bike so needed to switch to transit too. Also onboard was a nifty seat that folded forward so a kid's safety seat could be opened. The bus amenities included a reading light, small luggage rack, wayfinding information, the time, and the temperatur...