Amsterdam

Day 21. I need to start off my blog posts by not saying “today I” it is getting really repetitive and annoying to me. So without a further to do, here is how my day went. In the morning the group made its way to the University of Amsterdam to meet up with Meredith. We set off almost immediately on a bike tour to avoid the heat of the day. We looked at some key intersections and explaining the reasonings of the design.  She mentioned how much surveying is done from mapping where the bikes travel within the intersection, tracking telephones, and asking bike commuters what could be done to make the intersection safer. The first intersection is here, this link goes into details and contains photos of the before and after. https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2018/04/10/intersection-upgrade-a-banana-and-a-chips-cone/

The next intersection was mainly about the removal of traffic lights and replacing the traffic lights with yield signs. The thought behind this is that it would cause the bicyclist to be more easily flow through the intersection and not back up during rush hour. They also designed it so cars would have to yield to the bicyclist, making bicyclists the priority within the intersection.

The tour continued pointing out the various design techniques into play, but the main theme of it all was just to see how the cyclist move through a space and then design around how they move, this could be the removal of safety islands, making the cyclist light turn green a couple seconds faster, restriping an areas, or finding creative ways to remove cars from the street, putting them elsewhere. We wrapped up our time with Meredith with a discussion on what we observed during the scavenger hunt and questions that we developed using our observations. My group was asking more along the lines of, why is it some people bicycle while others don’t. This is a fairly simple and broad question, so to refine it we added what barriers to people face when picking a mode of transportation. This is a question that I have been asking this whole trip and how it will be returning to America, trying to get people on bikes and out of cars.

The rest of the day I had the opportunity to go on a tour of the red-light district where our tour guide spoke to us about the history of the district as well as the significance in what it plays in Amsterdam today.  Tomorrow is a free day in the beginning half of the day, I will finally be able to put the blackout curtains to the test and catch up on some sleep. The heat has been making it very hard to sleep for the last couple of days. And with that, I am off to bed.

-Chip