Skip to main content

July 19th

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 infrastructure is taken up by streets, and turning them into public spaces allows the creation of stronger communities. 

Another thing Ronald mentioned that really stuck with me was that you can't "only invest in hardware (infrastructure), but also software (behavior and education)". This thought is becoming a common theme in these easily bikable cities. Here in Utrecht, they focus on teaching kids at a young age how to get around on a bike. They put on traffic eduction in schools, encourage kids and parents to cycle together as much as possible, and even have biking tests in middle school. When you couple this sort of software with the impeccable hardware infrastructure not only the Netherlands but Sweden and Denmark have put in place you get one heck of a transportation computer. 

Ronald also touched on the perks of simplicity. Here they think of the bike as a simple tool rather than an accessory. They also focus on making the streets safe and simple. Take school zones for instance. The make them extremely safe without a bunch of obnoxious signage and painting. Heres a sketch of one done in my notebook:


After the presentation, Ronald took us two of Utrechts underground bike parking facilities. Together they can hold over 12,00 bicycles. 



You could even bike through the second one, and each had multiple floors. This sort of thing is where you can really see the priority of bikes over cars. It's so refreshing to see that some places in the world will actually put bikes ahead of cars to this extent. And it's hard not to blame them, they've been taught from a young age that bikes are the way to go, so why would they expect anything else? 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

July 29th

On our final day together as a group, we had rented out a private room in a restaurant to give presentations on our final project and share a final dinner together. Although the presentations only lasted three minutes per student, by the end of them all it was evident we had all learned a lot, so much that literally none of our final projects were on the same topics. It was really cool to see what everyone pulled from this trip with their different perspectives. As a person whos studying landscape architecture I focused on rethinking the street as a public space rather than just pavement for transportation and how the location infrastructure is in can encourage or discourage bicycle use. So many people had ideas that weren't completely centered around planning... even the planners. But, all of our ideas were still based around the idea of using the bicycle as the main form of transportation. As this is, unfortunately, my last blog post about my study abroad experience I thought i...
Post a Comment
Read more

July 20th

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

July 17th

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...
Post a Comment
Read more