Diferente Olanda-Copenhaga

https://cyclingfallacies.com/en/

https://urbancyclinginstitute.com/copenhagenize-and-building-the-cycling-city-a-comparative-
review/

https://urbancyclinginstitute.com/copenhagenize-and-building-the-cycling-city-a-comparative-
review/

Quizz

Intrebarea 1 – rapusnuri a, b,d

Intrebarea 2 – raspuns a

Intrebarea 3 – magnet bycicle

Curs 4 -

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/jul/29/how-groningen-invented-a-cycling-template-for-
cities-all-over-the-world

Designing the Cycling City  Designing for Cycling: What Do You Need To Know?  Cycling and Urban
Planning  Reflection – Designing for Cycling: What do you need to know?

This reflection will help you with your final project, so save your answers in a safe place! Copy and
paste the following questions into your word processor or notes app and jot down your thoughts:

1. Why is change urgent in your community?

I believe I can give you a formal perspective around cycling infrastructure (inside urban areas)
having on mind that I’ve been using the bicycle as my vehicle for 7 years

Traffic circulation plan/concept

Remove road space and turn it into a Bicycle space

Wide bike traks

Beeing closing streets for car trafic

Removing parking spaces for cars in order to introduce bicycle facilities

Creating bicycle streets or car free streets where bicycles share the space either with
cars or only with pedestians

Understanding how the city work, how the traffic flow work

A lthough Covid-19 has transformed our society, I can relate that micro-mobility is going to
have a protagonist and strongest role in urban design from now.

2. How will you leverage your unique experience and expertise to tell a moving story
about change? (refer to your M1L1 forum post) -
https://designingthecyclingcity.com/?topic=m1l1-what-can-your-expertise-and-
background-contribute-to-cycling
 Traducere:Cum vă veți folosi experiența și expertiza unice pentru a spune o poveste
emoționantă despre schimbare?

1) What areas of expertise do you identify with?

I am a jurist with a high interest in urban regulations. I have always been curious about how traffic is part
of our cities. I like to contribute to cities that are more liveable and more friendly to people walking and
cycling. My name is Elena and I am a traffic planner from the Netherlands currently living in Southern
Sweden, close to Copenhagen just on the other side of the border. The areas of expertise that I identify
with are generally everything about making cities more for people and less for cars, which is certainly
related to improvements in the pedestrian and cycling mobility.

2) How do you think your unique perspective will enhance our collective understanding of designing for cycling?
I have lived and worked in a number of places around the world. I always feel more connected to a city when I
can go out and walk or bike. Growing up in the Netherlands I naturally cycled a lot, and I still try to do that here in
Sweden and Denmark. My experience from various countries lets me see many differences and similarities. It
helps me to connect solutions to challenges and adapting them where needed.

I  think the most important point about my unique perspective and experience is that I’ve lived in car-centric cities
almost my entire life. In my last city in Brazil until coming to Portugal, Brasilia, essentially built for cars, even short
trips are very difficult to be made on foot or by bicycle, and I think it makes me “an expert” in what we shouldn’t
do with the cities, specially when we talk about turning them in cycling cities.

The peculiarities of any Greek city, e.g., small urban blocks, narrow roads, narrow sidewalks, limited urban
green, high population density, inadequate public transport service, combined with the delinquent driving
behaviors, the poor traffic law enforcement and the growing demand for safe and comfortable cycling
infrastructure are a challenge for every transportation engineer and every infrastructure design manual!

I also ran for political office and so understand the political difficulties in arguing for cycle infrastructure, especially
in cities that are strapped for cash and earn revenue from car parks.
I have spent 5 years working in the public sector.....

I  have a special interest in sustainable active mobility, public transport, and public space. I have studied and
worked on these topics for a while now, and love to use the bike to commute in cities.

I wish to contribute to this group by exchanging opinions and knowledge on how thinking, designing, and making
bicycle-friendly places, can help us to accelerate the pace of the necessary transformation of cities worldwide.
The urge to transform them into livable, human, just and particularly sustainable places. Thinking together how
can we participate in preventing the deterioration of our planet. I wish we can activate ourselves and jointly bring
more solutions to the table to speed up the change we need.

I have a lot of experience but I am not the only person to love both cities and the bicycle. My perspective is
unfortunately not unique enough. Being a ‘fearless’ and experienced cyclist can easily make me blind to the
challenges of inexperienced cyclists. What I am really trying to understand is the perspective of people who have
not always loved bikes. Why do they not cycle more or at all? Maybe then, I can design cities for less
experienced cyclists as mass conversion to the bicycle will transform all our cities and all our lives for the better.

I am interested in how the space is efficiently been used and how this space interconnect with the residents’
need, additionally, I am passionate in creating space which are imaginable and foster attachment to it.

I love to cycle, and I live in a city that was almost impossible to cycle in the last years. In 2020 the city decided
to invest in cycle lanes and other things to make Lisbon a more bicycle friendly city. So I can understand the
great challenges that a city faces.

I think I can use my traffic perspective of optimizing vehicle flow to provide space or/and improving the
cycling infrastructure at intersections and network design. I do have a good record of finding an
innovative, unconventional, solutions for the traffic at intersections and network without proposing to add
additional lanes or building bridges. In some cases, minimizing intersections’ size while improving the traffic
flow.

 I hope to contribute a practical understanding of the road right-of-way and road use based on experience.
My experience in the Governance and regulation of Transportation Networks Systems, has led me to meet a
balance relationship between the platforms provider and the citizens, understanding that public participation is a
key factor in the implementation of any project.  Then, I strongly believe that bikes can be the opportunity to
break away from the dominance of cars however, in order to implement these projects and move toward this
transportation mode it’s fundamental to involve our communities making them main actors in the design and
implementation of the projects.
How greater transport options improve mobility for everyone, but also how we can, and still need to, do so much
better from an equity perspective. I also know I need to learn more about how our streets can be made safer for
everyone, and that the idea of safe can be different across race, gender and age.
3) If you wish, leave your name & contact & social media information here so other course members can get in
touch with you.
My LinkedIn profile is.....

3. Who is your target audience when advocating for change? (communities,

professions, individuals)

Individuals and next communities

4. What is the biggest challenge of selling the idea of cycling to your audience? Pick 3
fallacies (https://cyclingfallacies.com/en/) that people may object to, and write
down your response. 

- “Our roads are too narrow for cycling infrastructure”

- “Cycleways and other facilities slow you down, to cycle fast you must use the road”

-“People frequently break the rules of the road when cycling (ignoring red lights, etc.)

5. “… but we are not the Netherlands/Denmark/other city!” is a popular objection. Can

you think of 3 cities with similar mode shares and high cycling growth that can serve
as more “reasonable” models for your work?

Groningen, Amsterdam or Utrecht, Stuttgart

Groningen is a city in the north of the Netherlands. It has around 200, 000 inhabitants, just
like many other Dutch cities, it is an historic city center it is quite dense with narrow streets
and in regard to this course, I can say the DCP is the world cycling capital. It has over 50%
of bicycle mode split, and basically if you walk around the city you see everybody cycling. In
this video you can see five minutes of the city. Within five minutes of a time lapse we see
157 bicycles. There are no cars at all passing. There is one horse and carriage that goes
right there. And what is even more amazing about this video is that we see so many
bicycles, but we don’t see bicycle infrastructure. And this is the concept that I would like to
discuss when I talk about Groningen. Sometimes the best bike lane is no bike lane at all.
And the story of Groningen, really shows this concept. So what happened in the city is that
the city center back in the 70s was quite dead. The stores were closing some streets were
not very welcoming. cars were allowed to go anywhere. The main square of the city was
actually a parking lot. But now if you look at Groningen you can see a bicycle heaven. And
what happened there is as you could see in the previous video, is that the city didn’t really
build so many bike lanes. They did something else. They applied a traffic circulation plan.
Basically what they made is that it was impossible to cross the city center with a car. Every
time you wanted to go from one part of the city center to another part of the city center, you
have to go outside and using a ring road in order to go to your destinations. However,
cyclists and pedestrians were allowed to just go wherever they want. This made every
journey of a cyclist or a pedestrian much shorter than the journey of a car. And it also made
driving quite uncomfortable in the city. If you woke up in the morning and wanted to go
somewhere, you would really need to have a good reason to use a car in order to get there.
You could use public transportation, walking or cycling, but taking the car is really the last
option. And I can promise you the plan wasn’t easy to apply. It’s been years in the 70s that
the city was working on it, and a lot of shop owners of course, were telling that they will leave
the city once they will limit car traffic. But well, surprise, surprise, it all worked. In the course
material we did one research paper about this circulation plan and another great video of
Streetfilms that shows the entire process of how Groningen became a bicycle heaven. In
recent years, more cities have been implying the traffic circulation concept. A great example
is Ghent in Belgium that made kind of the same thing like Groningen. They divided the city
into parts. And you could never cross from one part to another without going through a ring
road around the city. We have another link for a great film by Streetfilms from Belgium that
shows the process. And what we can learn from those cases is that sometimes you don’t
really need to build so much infrastructure. We already if the roads we already have the
streets, and if we will just limit the amount of cars driving there, it might be very easy and
comfortable and safe to cycle there. Sometimes, especially in small cities, we try to fit
everything. We try to fit car traffic and bicycle traffic and bus and trams, just doesn’t work
always. Sometimes we just need to make decisions. But they also know that examples from
Groningen and Ghent, cannot be replicated all around the world. Many cities are not as
densely built as those old European cities. And that’s why I want to introduce you Rotterdam.
This is where I’m sitting right now, and where I work a lot, and this city might remind you a
more North American city. I mean, we see those high rise buildings, very wide streets. It is a
post World War Two city. And when it was a rebuild after it was bombed in the war, it was
rebuilt really to accommodate cars. And what we see here is wide roads, a lot of lanes and it
is quite easy to go from one side of the city to another with a car. Or shall I say it was quite
easy because since the 90s, the city is really going through a revolution when it comes to
cycling. What the city did is basically looking at its structure and understanding how it works.
It is quite big roads, and there is enough space to remove road space and turn it into a
bicycle space. And what you see in Rotterdam, which you don’t see in other Dutch cities is
very wide bike tracks. And in the recent decades, since the city’s been working and building
more and more bike tracks, cycling has been growing quite crazy. There are neighborhoods
in the city with rise of 60% of modal split. And it’s not all there are streets that are busy and
yet narrow free walk streets and this is where the city is applying the same solutions like they
did in Groningen and in cities like Amsterdam or Utrecht. Rotterdam is being closing streets
for car traffic, removing parking spaces for cars in order to introduce bicycle facilities, and
sometimes creating bicycle streets or car free streets, where bicycles share the space either
with cars or only with pedestrians and we will learn about those concepts. But what I wanted
to show you with example of Rotterdam is how the city has to decide its policies according to
the situation according to the urban form according to the urban fabric. There is no one
solution fits all. This is very important to remember. In this course, we will not try to tell you
how your cities should look like you will do it in the last module actually. But what we will try
to show you is those different solutions and how Dutch designers choose between those
different solutions. We’re just giving you a tool set of bicycle solutions. So before finishing
this lesson, I would just want to beat those two concepts that I talked about. The first one is
that sometimes the best bike lane is no bike lane at all. And the second concept, which is so
important is to understand the context of the city. Cycling design, just like urban design is
much more than just installing bike lanes. It is understanding how the cities work, how the
traffic flows work, how to know fabric changes in each neighborhood and over there apply
the right solution.

Curs 4 - Designing for Cycling: What Do You Need To Know?