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
Our class has now been in session in Copenhagen for a week and it feels simultaneously like a blink of the eye and feels like we’ve been here for an entire lifetime. From an instructor perspective, I am appreciating the group – we have a collection of really interested students, curious and creative, serious about the material yet finding many opportunities for fun and joy, and overall have gelled into a cool, collected, mature, easy-going whole. It’s been a real pleasure to get to know students individually and watch the friendships develop easily.
The brief overview of what we’ve been doing:
Lecture by local professional on regional super cycle highways – the average bicycle commute is 13km while the average train commute is 12km. These regional cycle paths with minimal if no stops when traveling at a constant speed helps facilitate these distances easily.
Lecture and walking tour by staff at Gehl Architects – getting the context of why and how to design cities for people is always inspiring. Their basic message: start with the behavior and life of a city you want to exist and then design the built spaces and transport infrastructure to enable it. This is in contrast to building buildings, responding with transportation infrastructure, and then thinking about how to activate a city or street or neighborhood for people. It’s a simple, but profound, twist on the order of operations. For example, a typical US community will approve a big development project as an isolated building (say, new commercial building or multi-family student housing building) and then run a calculation of how many car trips that development will generate (never how many bike or walking or transit trips), then respond with requirements to widen roads and intersections to accommodate these fictional car trips (if you don’t widen the road those new car trips won’t exist), and after those things happen, perhaps there is thought about how to turn all of that building into places for people to enjoy. For those in Eugene, this is easily seen just about anywhere, though Franklin Blvd. is the most clear example of a ton of needed housing along a transportation corridor that is unsupportive of life happening on its edges, and the whole thing doesn’t add up to much joy, happiness, or life. The proposed redesigns of Franklin continue to disregard the reality of people wanting/needing connectivity on a human scale (happy to provide more detailed thoughts).
Visit to a Traffic Playground and talk with enthusiastic staff about the opportunity to help kids (and sometimes adults) learn to ride a bike and learn how to use the city’s bicycle transportation system through the mini-city built to scale, with traffic signals, cycle tracks, bus stops, and hedges representing buildings to help kids understand you can’t always see what’s coming from around the corner. This is probably one of the most instantly cute things (other than puppies) that exists.
Students had several assignments designed to explore all these topics while continuing to feel what it’s like to explore an entire metropolitan area (and beyond) by bike easily, comfortably, safely, and with zero need to think about or worry about cars, and all the positive benefits that accrue when a city is oriented that way. Students had to find five examples of play spaces for kids, find the end of a regional cycle superhighway, find where the single family homes are, etc. (You can read all about their experiences here: Class Blog of Blogs.
We had a rooftop social event with a UO alum which was a great way to engage with a Dane and see what an actual apartment and rooftop social space look like.
We had a traditional Danish dinner at the wonderful Restaurant Kronborg that students really enjoyed; this special meal was made possible by the Scan Design Foundation – thank you!!!
And we are about to take a tour of the Copenhill waste treatment and energy production facility – a place so clean that it is surrounded by housing, has a rock wall up the side, a hiking trail to the top, an artificial ski slope on top, and at the tippy top of the ski hill a cafe to enjoy a drink and have a relatively high vantage point to look over the flat city of Copenhagen.
We also had a meet up with another study abroad course from Portland State University so that students could meet others working to make our cities great places for people. We also asked the four Oregon transport professionals accompanying the classes to share out loud their own thought processes of what they are seeing in Copenhagen and how they are thinking about bringing insights back home.
And in between all of this has been plenty of laughter, great insights, fun adventures, trying new things, and more.
Here are some random pictures.
Elementary School with sea kayaking as regular part of PE, biology, and cooking classes. School is open to public use when school not in session, sharing facilities.Typical bike parking on every corner of every street everywhere.A city where kids can bike is a city that works.Copenhagen has plenty of places big and small to just hang out and enjoy the city, whether in groups or alone but with lots of other people. Allowing alcohol in all these public spaces is a nice way for a government to respect its people and happens to lead to much more public use of its public spaces (though we are eating ice cream).
First night of class, after a successful first day figuring out biking in Copenhagen and a pizza party in a local park.
A core aspect of this class is for students to document their experience – things they see, things they question, insights they develop, questions that arise, etc., and how everything evolves over the month and across places/systems/city sizes. They do this in some public way – blogs/vlogs/instagram – and with three audiences in mind: 1) friends/family/colleagues back home who have not had the privilege to embark on a similar learning adventure, but can nonetheless learn alongside students; 2) the students’ future selves who might appreciate a systematic travel diary; and 3) to me as a Professor of an actual class, so students should put some thought and insight into things rather than just showing their fun and whacky moments (though that is all part of things as well).
We also have three Oregon transportation professionals learning alongside students, and you get to follow along with all of them if you want…
On the way to Copenhagen to lead the study abroad class, I first stopped in Paris because I’ve been hearing so much about how Paris is trying to be the first city to take the 50-year lessons of Copenhagen and implement them in 5 years. So I was curious how things were going, what did the infrastructure look like, were people biking, and what did it feel like to bike within a system in the middle of rapid change?
I was only there a few days, so cannot give a full accounting, so I will give a partial one. But first, many many many thanks to Stein van Oosteren, a Dutch diplomat in Paris who also happens to be an expert (he’s Dutch) and evangelist for all the benefits that accrue to society by prioritizing cycling. Stein showed me around for a couple of hours and explained the transitions that have happened and those in progress. That perspective is really critical because it is easy to enter a new situation and be critical of how things are and un-appreciative of how far things have come. Paris is not a Dutch-level cycling city yet, but Stein’s perspective clearly made the case that it is on its way. You are welcome to stop reading here and just watch a wonderful Streetfilms video by Stein.
Here we go…..I’m really looking forward to this 2023 edition of the University of Oregon’s study abroad class on “Redesigning Cities for People (on bike)” where we spend a month basing ourselves in some truly fantastic cycling cities – Copenhagen, Malmö, Nijmegen, Amsterdam, and Utrecht. Nineteen undergraduate and graduate students from multiple US universities will join me as we learn from local experts, experience the feeling of belonging while on a bike, observe and investigate why and how things seem to work, and ponder what lessons can be brought home and how to accelerate their implementation. Joining our group will be three Oregon-based transportation professionals as our 2023 Scan Design Foundation Fellows. The Scan Design Foundation has generously helped support each of our students with scholarships and also helped bring these three professionals along to learn side-by-side with students. The professionals will share some of their professional experience with students, as well as receive a heavy dose of pushiness from students on why they aren’t doing more!
Be sure to follow everyone’s adventures on this unique experience from their own blogs – just look at the post on “Blog of Blogs” and explore from there!
