Amsterdam Study Abroad Day 2

6/26/11

Today we rode out to Ouderkerk. Again, as in Denmark, it’s great to have national bike routes to get from one city to the next. People of all ages were out enjoying the beautiful weather – on boat, by bike, walking, on motorized wheelchairs. Ouderkerk was quiet on a Sunday, but we enjoyed a picnic on the canal and a bit of exploration. There were some cute narrow streets some with shopping and some with residences.  On one street it seemed like you could nearly lean out of your window and hand your neighbor across the street a cup of sugar. Is this too close for comfort for Americans? Unlike some of the pedestrian zones I’ve seen on streets of this scale in other cities, it seemed that cars were allowed. Are tese streets any more heavily trafficked on a weekday?

For more pictures, check out my web album.

Lecture Day 2

Interviews: possible people to talk to > parents of kids getting to school, End of the work day

Signs are advisory; a predictable dance and rhythm develops

Fixing congestion often ranks as number 1 as a problem to solve on community opinion surveys > so we create strips that are anywhere USA

Classic slides to communicate what we do with our space. Amsterdam was built in a different era. There are already narrow roads and a limited right of way. They have to think about how to use the space efficiently. In the US most cities have a lot of space. The motivation to use our space efficiently isn’t really there. Our cities were built around the time of the automobile. Transportation technologies allowed people to live quite a distance from where they were.  On the upside, we have a lot of space to work with. We have three approaches: 1) we can build more capacity; 2) we can start pricing access to the space differently (congestion pricing) but how are the people who are priced out going to get through; 3)

Personal rapid transit, smart highways, way to solve congestion problems is through technology, oil and car companies.

Place is starting to become important again.

Ted - Disney 1961 video of the highway of the future.

T – It’s not just Americans. There are people in every city that want to move out of the city. They’re dirty. They have the “other”.

Sophie – Then why are cities so expensive?  We have this image of wanting community and thinking it takes place in the suburbs. I think community is more likely to take place in the city.

What do people want? What are their preferences of where they want to live? How do they get met? Mismatch between what the market provides and the type of environment that some people want. The planners are the problem via zoning. Land zoned to be single-family, low-density housing requiring a certain amount of housing.

People in Marc’s neighborhood get up in arms when multi-family housing is proposed for their neighborhood. The biggest complaint is that there isn’t enough parking for this housing and the residents will be cruising around looking for parking. They think parking requirements should be raised. People potentially living in that place wouldn’t have a voice because the place hasn’t been built yet. Local regulation is actually in the way.

There is always going to be a profit to be made in transportation. Companies just have to adapt.

Most profitable use in downtown Eugene right now is surface parking.

Images from Amsterdam. People in Chattanooga’s STAND survey said they wanted more parking downtown. Use these images to show them what that choice would look like for the downtown and then ask, is this really what you want?

Proposal to retrofit a section of downtown Eugene to match the type of space to fit current desires for commercial space. Chains like Whole Foods said they would come in. Community opposition sent the proposal down in flames.

In the US transportation is thought of as the top of the pyramid. Not  - we want to get places, so how does land use and policy support the places we want to go? Different paradigms.

Road diets – street was over-engineered, and bringing streets back into balance can actually improve vehicle throughput in order to

Ted – new law in Amsterdam, you have to step into street to gain right of way; huge push back.

Does the law need to be adjusted to correspond to how people behave? Reckless activity aside.  Idaho stops.

It is hard to envision something different than the way it is. Power to generate images is really powerful.

Bri – state-owned roads seem to be the major barriers

In the US we engineer so that if everyone just follows the rules it will save us from one another. British video of trucks navigating a narrow space and finding gaps. We design roads so that cars can pass each other in residential areas, but if you actually sit and observe, it’s rare that two cars have to pass each other from opposite directions.

how much does the lack of liability affect how we approach things? Is the city on the hook for anything design wise? How do you deal with insurance? Jason – how much is the city really on the line? It seems like a good excuse to be conservative

engineers design things knowing that they’re going to fail, but hoping that it will fail the least bad

High density next to commercial, but no way to connect from the housing to the shopping. High density is a buffer between single-family and commercial. Nico asked developers, city, architects why connections weren’t build. Answer: they didn’t think about it because it was suburbia and people don’t walk in suburbia. Nico surveyed residents and found that people were finding ways to cut through fences. It is the planners job to think about the whole area.

Marc’s Essential Truths about Transportation

1)      We travel because we want something (derived demand); it is a means to an end

2)      People, not vehicles, are core (mobility vs. accessibility); transportation should be about moving people; where is it that people want to get to in their daily lives, and how can we make that happen?

3)      We can’t build our way out of congestion, well we could but no one would want to live there (triple convergence theory)

Lecture Notes Day 1

Bicycle Transportation an Amsterdam Exploration

Check out Marc’s Resources -  Dutch design and policy, Copenhagen’s Ministry of Bikes, Dutch traffic laws

Agenda – How do we get more people on bikes back home? (How do we make a more sustainable environment? What is the status quo? How are transportation decisions made back home?)

Course Agenda –

·         Experience cycling in Amsterdam and neighboring cities (pay attention to details and big picture)

·         Learn basics of U.S. city development and transportation planning

Hear from local officials about city and transportation planning (how did communities decide to make the change from a car-choked city to a bicycle-oriented city? There is nothing inherent to this city compared to US cities that would cause them to make this decision when we did not. Ask speakers about culture, laws, policy, the tax structure)

·          

Figure out what and how local decisions can transfer to US context

3-scales

·         Individual decisions

·         Cultural norms (are you treated as an outlier?)

·         Policy regime of the place that you live

Assignments –

·         Journaling - How do your thoughts change? What subtleties do you pick up over time How can it work back home?

·         Interviews - Ask locals and tourists about biking? How do you like it? Do you bike back home if a tourist?

What arguments can we use for promoting biking back home?

·         Economic efficiency – bikes cost less (American value of choice, gas prices)

·         Infrastructure – here, no matter where you go, there is a place for you as a bike, if it’s a one way road against you, you can still ride on it as a bike (In Oregon we’re blessed that in the early 70s a law was passed that says that when any arterial is built or repaved, you have to put a bike lane on it)

·         Design – separate paths for bikes, grade change, signalization at tricky intersections

·         Land use – doesn’t make sense to bike if things are so spread out, on the other hand things are so spread out in America that biking might be the perfect transportation mode for our country, 2 – 4 mile bike ride might be perfect for our density (In the US transportation and land use policy don’t usually work together

·         Culture – there has to be a tipping point where biking isn’t a fringe activity, how do we get the culture to extend beyond college students and  (lower rate of bicycling comes from immigrating populations, because they don’t usually bike in their culture)

o   Park and bike system – if you park at this parking structure, you can get a free bike rental

o   Culture of fear – biking is not unsafe

o   Joyride – how do you work inside a city to change policy to improve bicycling? How do you get people to

·         Policy

·         Equipment and gear – how do we expect people to bike normally if they can’t get a bike that’s for normal traffic? (skirt guard, chain guard, upright, step-through, kickstand, lights built in, lock built in

·         The amount of money in racing bikes

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Decision to bike

·         Initial Considerations

o   Family responsibility

o   Work requirements

o   Preferences

o   Distance

o   Time

If feasible

\/

·         Trip barriers

o   Weather

o   Geography

o   Route feasibility

o   Route attractiveness

o   Traffic safety

If overcome

\/

·         Destination barriers

o   Storage

o   Showers

o   Employer support

If overcome

\/

Decision to Cycle

·         Courtesy of Kelly Clifton

Decision to drive

·         Initial Considerations

o   Family responsibility

o   Work requirements

o   Preferences

o   Distance

o   Time **

If feasible

\/

·         Trip barriers

o   Weather

o   Geography

o   Route feasibility  **

o   Route attractiveness **

o   Traffic safety

If overcome

\/

·         Destination barriers

o   Storage **

o   Showers

o   Employer support **

If overcome

\/

Decision to Drive

·         Marc’s variation, inspired by being in Amsterdam

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KK – big things that is missing from this is cost

Bri – in our group of friends it’s like you have to apologize if you drive

Marc – ultimately we should just bike because it’s reasonable, not to be part of the club

Kk – people need to be able to see themselves in the role of a cyclist

T – the info isn’t there – energy star rating, transportation rating

Marc – bicycling could be like recycling; it starts with educating students

Ted – training garden, fake city streets for kids to practice bicycling

American Transportation Paradigm (this has to change)

·         Congestion reduction (the problem to overcome)

o   Is congestion the problem? Good v. bad congestion. Good congestion due to immediate interesting place. Bad congestion due to far away place & no alternative mode.

·         Mobility (should be able to travel by car unimpeded; measured by vehicle throughput and speed)

o   Predominant congestion policy: mobility rules, build more; add lanes, build new freeways, build tollways

o   Empty corridor - No congestion! Great mobility!; this is the condition at first but it doesn’t last for long

o   Triple convergence theory (Downs 1992) & the Levine 2: 1) people switch the times of their trip; 1) you add capacity to a road so you can live a little further away now; 2) people switch their route 3) people switch modes; Levine 1) increased capacity stimulates new development patterns further away; 2) new trips > this is why new roads don’t fix the congestion problem

·         Need for space

·         Dance averse (dance being lots of people navigating a space, figuring out how not to crash into each other; we try to engineer out potential conflict)

·         Land use planning separate from transportation planning (this is where Portland has been brilliant in putting these two things together; where do things go, and how do you get between them – why aren’t these two things considered together?)

The traffic engineer is the one legally responsible.

They can be your best friend or your worst enemy.

Praise your traffic engineers for the risks they take.

Often transportation planners are intimidated by having to frame things in a way that the engineer will approve.

Engineers are problem solvers, don’t come to us with solutions.

Chloe – How do we take quality of life and quantitate it?

Amsterdam Study Abroad Day 1

6/25/11

After lecture Shane and I went on a 13 mile run. It was fun to run along the canals and see the houseboats and modern architecture. I’m not sure what the cost of Amsterdam’s houseboats are, but in Denmark they are relatively low cost. It is great that people of a range of income levels have the opportunity to live on waterfront property. Shane said that there is much more funding available to support multi-family housing in Europe. In the States, only low-income multi-family housing is funded. We ended up on an outer ring of the city, 6 km from Schipol, running along a street with advisory bike lanes. Basically two way auto traffic is allowed on a street with one auto lane and two red bike lanes with dashed white stripes. If cars approach from opposite directions, they are allowed to drift into the bike lane in order to pass each other. In the States, this would be a traffic engineer’s nightmare, but it seemed to work. We didn’t see any cyclists on the road at the time we were running, but there were a few cars. It all seemed to work out alright. It is probably best for a low-traffic street.  We got lost but were able to reorient ourselves with the wayfinding maps and return to the hotel on the tram.

One of the parts of the Anne Frank house that affected me the most was where the girls’ heights were marked on the wall. It brought the story to life and humanized Anne. The quote on the wall was a second hit when I was already starting to tear up. Anne wrote of how she longed to go outside, and dance, and ride her bicycle. We are so lucky to be free to move about wherever we want. The Nazis recognized the value of mobility and banned the Jews from riding on trams or in cars. What does that mean for our cities today? Anyone who cannot operate a car in a car-dependent society is oppressed – children, people with disabilities that prevent them from driving, elderly people who have lost the ability to drive, and people who cannot afford to own an automobile.

In the evening we got to see the final performance of Het National Ballet’s 2011 – 2012 season. This was my friend Megan Gray’s first season dancing with the ballet. We grew up together dancing in Texas. It was like picking back up with an old friend (which we’ll hopefully get to do tonight face to face!). I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to recognize her. She was still the same Megan, but she is even more charming and her dancing has matured beautifully. There was one especially complicated pattern where the dancers circled around each other in opposite directions, some walking forwards, some walking backwards. I think I lean more towards ordered, controlled traffic flow partially because of my ballet background. As a choreographer, it is my job to organize and direct the dancer’s movement to achieve a desired visual. It is the same reason I was drawn to dressage as a horseback rider. Although I did dressage as a solo event, it was about directing the horse’s movements gracefully around the field.

Nevertheless, removing traffic controls is worth consideration. It requires people to utilize common sense. It is a constant struggle to find the appropriate bounds to freedom. My father brought that idea up yesterday when we were talking about the Anne Frank house, but it also applies to freedom to move in a shared space. My father brought up the idea in response to my qualms over the questionnaire at the end of the tour. There was a video display on modern forms of racism. At the end of the video the narrator would pose a question, such as “Should this political party be outlawed?”. Then the group could respond yes or no and the results would be displayed on the screen. There were some that I couldn’t answer. Should you be able to outlaw a political party? Do you do it at the point that they verbalize a dislike for having a particular ethic group in the country, or do you wait until it’s too late and they have already begun to act on fear and hatred? Both in traffic and politics it is difficult to set boundaries on freedom.

In Amsterdam, there isn’t a specific direction that you are supposed to travel on bike facilities. If there is a bike lane or cycle track, you can travel either direction. I think I like that. It follows people’s natural behavior. As long as the space is wide enough to allow two-way travel, maybe if people are going to go against traffic anyway, it is better if cyclists and drivers anticipate that it will happen. Sometimes I want to go against traffic for a block or so without having to go through the trouble of crossing a busy street. On the other hand, perhaps I could just walk.