We all have our things and for whatever reason, I am just so amazed and fascinated at the ability of so many individual humans to negotiate ambiguous space successfully as it only works for individuals if it works for everyone else as well. Here is the scene when a ferry of people on foto and bike are let off at Amsterdam’s central train station and mix with a perpendicular stream of people on foot and bike. This happens every 10 minutes all day long and please note that the volumes of people here are fairly mellow compared to peak rush hour times of day.
This is a brief post to share how fun it is to watch so much learning going on through the students in the class. I highly recommend browsing their blogs and just know that most students are not ‘bike people’ or at least weren’t at the start of the class. That is, their identities didn’t revolve around the bike, their confidence of cycling as daily transport was often quite low within their U.S. context, and their attitude toward the class context was a mixture of excitement and skepticism. In other words, these students who self-selected into a study abroad class on designing cities for people on bike are very reflective of a ‘normal’ person raised in a U.S. car-dominated context. And thus, their insights from the class experience are extremely relevant to a much broader public and should be understood as such. Their insights are not of extremists looking o push an unpopular agenda on the masses, but as individuals who had the privilege to learn and experience cities of all sizes that make it possible for people aged 8-80 to do nearly all of their daily trip making and life living by bike, and to do so happily, safely, comfortably, and efficiently.
Read their blogs and share selected posts with others in your orbit that you think would benefit from the reflections of these insightful students.
We have way so many signs in our public spaces trying to regulate/inform/guide our behavior that it often creates a mass of visual clutter or a type of visual pollution that makes the public realm ugly. (I think the same about the mass parking of cars on our public right of ways.). Wouldn’t it be nice if the design of space regulated/informed/guided our behaviors, leaving our viewshed to more interesting things to see, question, or enjoy?
The ‘classic’ example of this is the use of speed limit signs, which basically do very little if the street isn’t also designed for the posted limit. Pay attention the next time you are driving on a big arterial road and the speed limit sign somewhat randomly changes from 50 to 35 to 25 without any change in actual street design. Streets are almost always approved by traffic engineers to allow for safe use above posted speed limits because they assume people speed and want speeders to do so safely. But like many things in outdated traffic engineering thinking, designing a street for fast speeds actually is the thing that makes speeding happen. (The other classic bit of evidence that seemingly still has not made it into traffic engineering education or practice is the knowledge that widening roads does not reduce traffic congestion, but actually induces more car trips. Or that widening roads is good for the environment because it reduces congestion (false!). Or that we should design streets for peak travel times instead of the other 158 hours per week of non-peak usage (false!). Or that we should care about the number of people we want to get through an intersection in a given time, not the number of vehicles through that intersection (true, but not how current practice is done!). This is why we can’t have nice things. I could go on.)
In any case, I’ve been paying attention to just the use of materials to divide transport space and guide behavior and have found a bit of beauty in all of it.
[stylized] from right to left: sidewalk with vertical brick paver lines to help visually impaired keep on the path and doublewide brick to indicate edge; bicycle cycle track of smooth asphalt on a different plane, change in material at edge of cycle track indicated level change; then street level asphalt.[stylized] from left to right: car travel lanes, car parking lane, rounded brick separator (permeable for cyclists to get in and out), cycle track, gravel planting zone, sidewalk.[stylized] left to right: sidewalk pavers (individual pavers can be removed for repair or to access linear pipes/wires underneath without digging up entire sidewalk), brick rain gutter that also separates spaces and offers linear information for visually impaired, bike storage/tree/bench space.
from right to left: sidewalk with pavers (see above), brick vehicle drop off lane, red bike priority lane, car travel lane.[stylized] from tight to left – sidewalk paving tiles, rounded brick divider, smooth bicycle track, green strip, car travel lane.Orange brick on right is sidewalk, gray brick in middle is shared bike/vehicle space (use of brick tells drivers it isn’t prioritized for them), diagonal orange brick indicates where water pipe is underneath, taking building rain water and moving it into the canal
