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...