Better Biking

 Okay guys its official. I have found the best city in the world. Utrecht is definitely the most underrated city to have ever existed. It has it all. Canals, bike infrastructure, cobblestone roads, old buildings, awesome food, and to top it all off, no tourists. It seemed like everywhere I went, there was another adorable street with an endless amount of things to look at and explore.  Amsterdam is great and all, but it feels a bit more artificial than Utrecht for sure. In Utrecht you are guaranteed to interact with locals, and the store owners are much more receptive and friendly towards tourists because they are not interacting with them 24/7. Plus everything is a lot cheaper because the tourist tax has yet to take effect in that area like it has in Amsterdam.  The biking in Utrecht is another plus. Unlike in Copenhagen, the cobblestones don't rattle your bones to an inch of your life. Somehow they maintain the old, quaint cobblestone road look, while still having it be...

 For the final part of this class, we are assigned to do a project on an aspect of Dutch/Danish bike culture or infrastructure and relate it back to the US. The topic I am going to cover is bike suburbs. In the US we love our suburbs, but the way we design them makes them harmful to the environment and not conducive to sustainable living. American suburbs are very much centered around the car. You need a car to do pretty much anything or go anywhere. This leads to a lack of a sense of community in the neighborhood. There isn't as much walking around and seeing your neighbors. When you are home, you're in your house, and when you leave you go and get right into your car, limiting any chance interactions you can have with the people around you. As a result, American suburbs are very sleepy enclaves and can even be dangerous.  Most people believe that a busy city is more dangerous than a sleepy suburb, but a lot of the time the opposite is true. Jane Jacobs, a famed urbanist coin...

 A few days ago in Amsterdam, we met with Meredith, a professor at University of Amsterdam, and we did what she calls the PUMA activity. In this activity we were to go to different areas of the city, interact with locals, and make observations of how the different areas of the city differed from each other.  The city was broken up into three sections: The canal district (the oldest and most touristy part of the city), the pre-war area, and the post-war area. I went with two other classmates first to the pre-war neighborhood, and then to the post-war one.  Centrum is canal district, Zuid, Oost, and West is pre-war, Nieuw-West is post-war The pre-war neighborhood was much like you would expect from an old European city. Lots of rowhouses with multi-use buildings on the main streets and residential buildings spreading from them. There was a lot of diversity in the kinds of shops around, but not much diversity in the people using them. It was mostly affluent white people. We ...

When I first got to Copenhagen it seemed like the bike infrastructure there was the best in the world. Those who had been to the Netherlands disagreed with me and kept assuring me that I would change my mind once we got to Amsterdam. I'll admit that I didn't quite believe them, and I thought that the biking in both places would be relatively the same.  Turns out I was wrong. That doesn't happen very often, but I can admit when it does. As I described in an earlier post, Denmark has great bike infrastructure, with separated bikeways and bike-specific modifications to the street, but the Netherlands is on a whole other level. The key difference is that in the Netherlands, every street is meant for bikes. If there isn't a bike lane its usually a fietsstraat (bike street). On a fietsstraat, the asphalt is dyed red and cars are not allowed to overtake the bikes. Additionally, cars that are crossing a fietsstraat are forced to come up onto the fietsstraat as it is raised abov...

As this trip comes to a close, the biggest emotion that comes up is gratitude. If you’ve been following along, you will note that this is not the first time I am expressing that my life has forever been changed. I feel like I see cities in a wholly new light after seeing what is possible when an entire society decides to bike more. I am also super grateful for all the people I have met during this trip. It’s not every day that you meet someone you feel you will be a lifelong friend, but I am coming away from this experience with one or two of those. The most important thing that I have taken from this trip though is more personal. I have never had a clear plan or path for where I want my life to go after college, but now I feel I can confidently say that I will make it my life’s mission to make American cities more accessible by bike. The goal is to finish up my last year at UO this year and then find myself in San Francisco next year, hopefully with an internship centered around cycli...

 Another really excellent aspect of biking here in The Netherlands is that it is really designed for regular people to use. The networks and infrastructure are not designed with high speed racing cyclists in mind, instead they are for anyone and everyone who feels a need or desire to hop on a bike and get from point A to point B.  The term "regular people" also extends to the disabled community One of the biggest differences I have seen between Denmark and the Netherlands is that there are vastly more differently abled people out here biking and using the bike infrastructure than I witnessed in Denmark. I think this is because the bike infrastructure is just so homogeneous and reliable that you know you're not just going to get dropped by a bike lane into the middle of nowhere. In the US you could be going down the most beautiful bike lane in the world and suddenly it would stop and you'd be left to fend for yourself so obviously people with movement issues wouldn...