Europe's Sustainable Urban Design

Thursday was the first of two days with Meredith Glaser of the University of Amsterdam's urban cycling program. The morning started at 9:00 AM at which time she promptly told the people who showed up at 9:00, "if you're five minutes early, you're five minutes too late". Once the short meeting began Meredith shared a lot about the culture of Amsterdam specifically around using bikes. One of the biggest takeaways from our conversation with Meredith was the fact that most people bike here because of the convenience, but it wasn't always the easiest and fastest way to get around town. It became what it is through a lot of hard work and dedication, that is still going on to this day. This has been a consistent theme in every city we've gone to so far, and it makes me wonder what we could do to a city like Eugene if we got the right mix of elected officials and the people of the city to come together and make a change. Something else that struck me in our co...

Our first full day in Amsterdam started with a meeting and tour from mobility expert Marjolein de Lange. Marjolein works for Fietsersbond the biking union in the Netherlands. They work towards improving and expanding bike-friendly infrastructure through working with all forms of government as well as the public. The work Marjolein and Fietsersbond does can't be described as anything less than badass. During the presentation, we learned that much like all of the other cities we've visited Amsterdam wasn't always a biking city, and it took a ton of work to get to where it is today in terms of sustainable transportation options. In fact, through the 1960's they lost a lot of bicycle infrastructure and put in heaps of infrastructure for cars and their drivers. Heres a photo representing the changes Amsterdam went through during that time. As you can see tons of major and minor driving roads were put in and around the city while tons of biking lanes and roads were...

Tuesday was our last morning in Utrecht and our first day in Amsterdam. How'd we get to Amsterdam you ask? We biked of course! We saddled up our touring bikes one last time and rode 44 KM north to Amsterdam.  I'd have to say that if I ranked all four of our long bike tours, this one would be number one. This is for a few reasons; the main one being separation from car traffic. We were rarely near roads or streets with cars on them, and when we were the vehicles came few and far between. This really helped me enjoy my ride through the Dutch countryside, in fact, I often found myself feeling like it was just a bike ride, not a commute. This was a stark contrast from the previous rides where it was hard to forget we were commuting from one place to another. Not to say I didn't like the other rides, but when there are now cars around you, you have the ability to let your mind wander a lot more. This is one of my favorite parts of long-distance bike rides, it's kind...

On Sunday the group and I had the opportunity to tour the countryside surrounding Utecht by following the river Rhine, as well as experience the suburb master-planned for bike use known has Houten. The ride to Houten was absolutely beautiful. Full of great views, WW2 bunkers, tons of sheep and cattle, and even a stop to swim, I must say I thoroughly enjoyed it. A lot of this ride was either on or adjacent to the roadway in which cars and motorcycles were going pretty fast. At first, this was a scary thought, but to our luck, the power bikes have over moto vehicles in the city carried over to the countryside. Cars and cycles would either wait until they had a safe way to pass us and go around if needed and all of them slowed down significantly when coming near and passing us. This reassured me that I, in fact, was safe. This experience was a little to me. Not that I felt unsafe biking around the countryside of Denmark or Sweden, but here it really felt like I was the m...

Friday was our first opportunity to have a bike tour in the city of Utrecht and really experience and see some of the infrastructures we had learned about the day before. It began with Ronald (the city planner we met with the day before) taking us out to a new suburb development in which they are bringing the same bicycle infrastructure out to so that occupants of the new neighborhood will still be able to use their bikes to get to work. This new development was across the canal, so of course, they had to build a new and beautiful pedestrian bridge in order to connect the cyclists to the city.  This bridge did not only act as a bridge either. The turned the base of the bridge as well as the bike ramp down into a small elementary school complete with a playground and basketball court. This use of space is amazing! Here they want to keep everything compact and dense so that it is possible to make rides from the burbs to the city center in 20 mins without a pr...

Our first full day in Utrecht started with a meeting in Utrecht's city hall with traffic engineer Ronald Tamse. The first thing on our agenda was a presentation Ronald put together for us. One of the first things he showed us was this graph showing the transportation priority: This shows the growing priority of bicycles around the world and in Holland specifically. In fact, he argued that they have more priority in the Netherlands and Utrecht than in Copenhagen. I have to say I agree with him as well. While biking around the city you get the feeling that bikes and the people riding them are more important and more powerful than motor vehicles. This sort of thing causes more people to bike out of sheer convenience, and when there's less traffic on the street it creates more sociability on the street. Through this process, streets can become social or public spaces, rather than just a piece of pavement made for cars to drive on. This is great because so much of a cities ...

After a fun night of celebrating our professor Marc's 50th birthday in Malmö, it was time to get the show back on the road and head to the Netherlands. We left our hotel at 5:45 AM in order to catch a 6:30 AM train from Malmö back to Copenhagen. This ride only took 35 mins to go across and under the channel between Sweden and Denmark. I had never crossed a channel on a train before so it was quite fun to experience. Once we got to Copenhagen and went through airport security we had a little over an hour to burn until our flight to Amsterdam was boarding. Some of the group had rougher mornings than others... The flight to Amsterdam was fast, in fact, they even shaved 20 mins off of the original wait time. Once we got our luggage we hurried to the train station of the massive transportation hub that is the Amsterdam Airport and caught the first train to Utrecht. This train ride only took 45 mins to go 22 miles. I found it very comfortable as well. Once we got to our hostel I...

July 16th was the first and only full day we had in Malmö. It started with a lecture from two of Malmö's urban planners in their city hall building. Malmö is growing extremely fast and what the citie's plan is to not increase car use as the population increases. They plan to do this in many ways, one being infrastructure. Right now they are trying to rethink the street, they call it Bicycle streets 2.0. Their ideas include cutting cars out of roads and making them specifically for bikes, giving bikes right aways in intersections and adding in bidirectional bike paths. I found that the idea of bidirectional pathways bad, and even unnecessary at some points, even though the Malmöplanners decided on them through doing tons of research. I didn't spend to much time on the cities bike lanes but when I was on the bi-directional pathways, I felt very uncomfortable. Bikes are coming at you from the opposite direction, often in very close quarters. I understand that on some small s...

July 15th marked the third and final day of our long-distance biking journey through Sweden and Denmark. We got up early and caught one of the first ferries off of the Island of Ven. Our destination; Malmö. This nearly 30-mile ride was the easiest and quite possibly the most interesting in terms of long-distance bicycle infrastructure. For most of the ride, you are fallowing a highway but rarely are you ever on the highway with your bike. In fact, nearly the rout is on a bike trail separated from the highway by plants, barriers, or both. This not only made me feel safe but it also assured me that it was most likely the fastest route because its the same as cars take. Another thing I found very interesting was the fact that this major highway only had 2 lanes going in each direction. Obviously, in the U.S. three lanes is a common theme,  but here that does not seem to be the case. I also never saw any traffic backup, this could be due to time of day, but Wally and I saw/passed ...

Yesterday (July 15th) was another travel day by bike. this time we packed up our things from the Danhostel in Helsingor, Denmark and set our sights across the channel to Sweden. After a Sunday full of rest and sitting by the water I was fully rested and energized for this 20-mile journey to the Swedish Island of Ven. The first leg of the trip was crossing the channel on a ferry. Not only is it awesome that there is an option of being able to transport yourself across a massive body of water along with something other than a car, they even make it super convenient. As bikers, we were the first ones on the ferry and the first ones off to the city of Helsingborg.  This continues to show the way these countries respect bikers. With treatment like this, it's hard to think of using any other mode of transportation. Once in Helsingborg, the group was able to get a feel and walk around the city for about an hour and a half. I took the time to catch up with some family members and e...

Yesterday was both the day I said goodbye to Copenhagen and the longest bike ride of my life. These two things might seem like a bummer or just bad in general. But to be honest I was beginning to want to get out of Copenhagen, and the ride to Helsingor was more beautiful than hard. We began the 30-mile journey from Copenhagen to Helsingor at around 9:00 AM knowing there would be some pitstops along the way. The first being a group meeting and tour of the newly developed (some parts are still under construction) neighborhood of Copenhagen by the name of Nordhavn. Nordhavn is special because it is built on top of all the earth and much they dug up when building the new metro line in Copenhagen. I find this so smart. Copenhagen is having a housing crisis right now, and rather than just tell people to bad, you can't live here unless you know someone who can get you into an apartment, they as a city decided to think outside the box. I know this will be quite expensive housing but they...

Today we had the once in a lifetime opportunity to come to the Copenhagen offices of BIG (Bjorke Ingels Group). While circumstances only allowed us to spend a bit of time listening to a presentation and asking questions, it was extremely awesome to learn about what is considered to be one of the best if not, the best architectural firm in the world from the inside. One of the craziest things about this firm is they got to the point they're at in about the past 15 years. In fact, a majority of their projects haven't been finished or developed yet. While talking to Them today it was evident that they didn't just get to the top through beautiful designs, amazing renderings, and breathtaking models. BIG constantly pushes the limit and goes through the extra mile when designing. They do things like try to actually make their buildings as sustainable as possible rather than just go for checkmarks off of the LEED checklist. Whether that bee green roofs that function as skiing...

Today's first activity was a meeting with Randa Ruben Jaber Sebelin. Sebelin is the coordinator of staff,  for all staffed parks in Copenhagen. Staffed parks, which are unique to Copenhagen are playgrounds that contain 1-4 staff members at a time. originally started to keep children safe, there are now 26 (with a 27th being made) fully staffed parks that host events, activities, and continue to keep the children safe. They were created under the principles of play and movement, education, creating a meeting place, and creating safety. Along with this, the program has a lot to do with creating community. Not only do the staff make relationships with the children who are going to these parks but a lot of times they make relationships with the parents. Particularly in lower-income neighborhoods. This meeting took place at Traffic Garden Park. This was a park designed to teach young children the traffic laws of the city and in particular how to bike around. They have small traffi...