Better Biking

 When I signed up to go on this trip I had a feeling that it would be one of the most exciting things I have ever done, but I had no way of knowing that it would make me feel like my life has been changed for the better in so many ways. Every day I find myself thinking and saying that I can't believe that this trip is actually school but at the same time, I truly feel like I am learning an immense amount, no matter what I am doing. Simply being in urban environments like Copenhagen and Odense has opened my eyes to what could be possible to achieve in American cities.  When we were in Denmark we met with Andreas Rohl who was the director of the bike program in Copenhagen from 2007 to 2015 and what he said totally changed my perspective on what it might be possible to do with bikes in America. When I first got to Copenhagen it was easy to assume that the city had always been a bike-centered society and so it would be nearly impossible to replicate anything of the like back home....

 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...

 For the most part this trip we have been biking in either large cities with well-established networks or in rural areas. Nijmegen and Odense were good opportunities to see what good bike infrastructure looks like on a slightly smaller scale. With these smaller cities it is easier to envision how we could implement what they have into American cities. Not everything is as crazy as it seems in Utrecht or Copenhagen.  The most surprising insight I have gleaned from our meetings with city officials and planners has been that the citizens in Denmark and the Netherlands can be just as resistant to cycling infrastructure implementation as they are in the US. This fact alone is enough to give me hope that we could potentially have something similar bike-wise to what they have here. It is easy to look at places like Denmark and the Netherlands and decide that the US could absolutely never have anything close to what they have here because it is "just different", but from what I have ...

 A few days ago we were on our way back to our lodgings from Nijmegen and Nina and I were thinking that we would like to see what the healthcare system is like here in the Netherlands. We brainstormed and decided that the best way to do this would be to roughhouse on our bikes to the point where we would lose control of ourselves and crash to the pavement, hopefully injuring ourselves in the process. So we did just that, and Nina sustained a really excellent face laceration and I managed to escape with nothing more than a scraped knee and a bruised ego.  After initial impact, Nina and I were sitting on the side of the road, waiting for one of the trip leaders, Floris, to come rescue us. We were quite the sight with Nina's head gushing blood, and our bikes strewn around us, yet none of the passerby's even glanced our way. We were prepared to remain on the curb for the next 20 minutes while Floris was on his way, but after about two minutes, this rather severe older Dutch woman ...

I don't consider myself a cyclist, but I do love using my bike as my main tool to get from point A to point B. The past few days, we have been doing some longer distance rides and it has been a highly satisfying and enjoyable experience. I have never done a long distance ride before, as most of my trips are just around an urban setting, so the thought of doing three days of 28 mile rides was a bit intimidating, but I was excited at the opportunity to push myself and try a new style of biking.  When we left Copenhagen for the countryside, we took two trains, and on a side note, this was the most pleasant train experience I've ever had. The station was clean and beautiful, and the train car was also clean and very comfortable. There was designated places to put your bike and luggage, and it all felt very futuristic and precise. The trains have a very regular schedule that factor in waiting for other trains to pass, so that you don't have unexpected delays. For longer land tra...

When you imagine great bike infrastructure, it is easy to think of bike superhighways and bike bridges, but what makes Copenhagen and other great biking cities so amazing is all of the tiny details that they incorporate and make the expected norm. At the end of the day its about making a cyclist feel like they belong in the city and are not an afterthought, and the micro-infrastructure measures that Copenhagen takes makes all the difference.  Instead of listing out all of the things Copenhagen has that make biking so beautiful, I will instead take you on a little bike journey.  I am getting ready to leave my hostel and go for a ride around town and I unlock my bike with a key that inserts into the built-in back wheel lock, making it easy to park anywhere around town.  (Image taken from Dutch Bike Bits on google) The bike parking is located around the back of the hostel on an elevated deck, and I have to go down a flight of stairs to get to the street. Luckily, there is a ...