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...

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 (lik...

A necessity of long travel, laundry beckoned this day. I woke up early, snagged breakfast at the hostel, spent some time drafting blogs (yet to be posted), and walked over to a laundromat. Utrecht may be 900 years old this year, but life essentials blend right into shopping and residential where mixed-use never went out of style. Washing, 4.80€. Drying, 2.40€. Walking around urban canals still used for merchants and pleasure boats, priceless. (Cash only.) After finishing my laundry, I bumped into some others from our crew blogging in the hostel lobby (which is set up something like a coffee shop or other eat/work/chat space). A few of us (Delaney, Nick, and I) set off for lunch from a vegetarian food cart with the particular style of food from the same state of India where our classmate, Anisha, hails from. Oh. My. God. It was delicious!  The cart had a prime place next to the previously-mentioned mall. We headed in to find a few other necessitie...

Our local plan-gineer, Ronald, took us on a bike tour that started in Utrecht, went out to the suburb-built-with-bikes-in-mind of Houten, still farther out into the rural lands to swim in a lake, and back to Utrecht. All in all, I biked somewhere between 31-33 miles. Famous Dutch pancakes awaited us at Theehuis Rhynauwen Pannekoeken closer to the city on the way back. What I noticed most on this day-long tour was how easy it was to bike so far without needing to pedal fast. (That and the one time we shared the road with a giant construction truck of some kind on a stretch with very little wiggle room.) We very rarely stopped due to network design elements (such as traffic lights). Now and then we'd come upon a road intersection where we needed to yield, but that happened less as we exited the urban areas. I don't know that I'd necessarily pedal myself out to the lake for a swim if I lived in Utrecht, but I might go if a couple of friends came along t...

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...