 Hello everyone and welcome to this edition of Cycling Research Review interview edition and today we're here with Kevin Kreizek at Nectar 2019 in Helsinki. How are you doing Kevin? Good, excellent. So just a few questions for you today and I've been following your work very closely and I'm very excited to have this conversation. So to start off, what inspired you to write the your 2011 paper a view from the bicycle path? So at that time we were finishing up a major project for the city of Melbourne in Australia in which they commissioned work for myself and Ann Forsyth who's now at Harvard University. We were both at the University of Minnesota at the time and the the question that they were trying to better understand was given the burgeoning research in land use and transportation and particularly walking and cycling what can we now say with some degree of certainty about what promotes or impedes people to either get on a bike or walk? What do we know from the canvas of literature? The 200 studies I believe that we tried to get our hands on and look at the variety of kind of attitudinal factors, but more so the built environment factors and maybe some promotional or campaign type what they call soft measures and we saw that there was a lot coming from engineering and we saw that there was a lot coming from urban planning and that place-making literature Which was able to tell us a lot. Yeah, but when you further peeled back different layers of the onion It became readily apparent to us that wow, there's something about this speed of movement That we don't know a lot about. Mm-hmm. We know a lot about car movement We know a lot about pedestrian movement We actually know a lot about Transit. Yeah, but there was not a lot about how people perceive the visual environment or their spatial cognition You know going at say 12 miles per hour 20 kilometers per hour Through cities and how there was a different level of appreciation for the built environment in that respect so We've decided to kind of look through the prism of this new Need for research and say wow There might be something different about this mode that we need to better inventory for future researchers to pick up and And so we came up with these different factors of Criteria and how the different mindsets are possibly compared to what basically compared to walking walking and motorized travel and You know, there's it's more of a Not necessarily theoretical contribution But it's helping pave the way for future researchers to look at these issues with with greater scrutiny Mm-hmm. And how did that work then carry forward to your most recent paper about? Considering more qualitative aspects in the studying cycle. It's a direct descendancy from that so Subsequent to that paper Actually can come with it with Simultaneously with that we were looking at how measures of accessibility Could be used to better predict where future infrastructure investments should be placed and How we can better measure accessibility Again from a auto perspective from a walking perspective, but nobody nobody really did this from a cycling perspective Okay, so so that fast forward to the notion that we have travel time savings, which is often the Mobility function that is trying to be minimized In accessibility equations. So if something's closer, it's gonna be more accessible Now something's up shorter travel distance. It's going to be more attractive This is not always the case You know, it's not a linear function going forward with respect to people's desire to want to minimize travel and so does this possibly vary by by mode and Yeah, I think that it does vary by mode and it varies considerably by mode in so far as there is more There are more arrows pointing to the fact that there is a positive utility provided to bicycle What is that positive utility? It varies by individuals. Yeah, so sometimes it's You know the cognitive benefits sometimes it's the actual win through your hair sometimes it's the physical activity That you that you're seeing these are all going to vary by individual, but accessibility measures unfortunately do not have a Capability to capture those phenomena, but yet a place is still accessible to other individuals by bicycling if we Take these considerations into into effect So again, this recent contribution was a call to action for subsequent researchers to better understand how these kind of call them Hedana called an auto-telec intrinsic is the label that I used in this most recent contribution How those elements could be better waived into measures Thank you in relation to your field of expertise What problems are academics struggling most with these days and how can a better conceptualization of these problems help us understand the world better? that is a Outstanding challenge sorry a very good a very good question outstanding challenge The world is changing so fast with respect to our industry transportation right now And there is a tendency to say oh well what happened in the past is we're going to better understand that and project it into the future There's an inherent difficulty with that given our Progivity for wanting to do that. That's the whole basis for getting a PhD is to understand the complexity of a particular issue And then translate it to some sort of future practice practice or policy So we need to better understand that or at least recognize that that anything that we're trying to understand about the past is going to be limited and so any models that are created any kind of forecasts that are based on The past data collection exercises are going to be challenged on that account on that account That's not to say we shouldn't do it That's just to say that we need to be mindful of it and weigh the strengths and limitations of any modeling approach or past reconciliation of trends into future conditions the second has to do with the I think the complexity by which travel decisions are made in cities and We know that the travel making decision is really messy What we have a harder time understanding is the Degree to which a study that is performed in context X could have validity to context Y the external validity here and We often say oh well, you know the cycling infrastructure Land use transportation pattern in the Netherlands is XYZ Therefore we can copy and paste you hear about a lot and that is a Often Suggested remedy for cities in the in North America, and I don't think that you know the Dutch cycling Embassy They know how to for example understand what's going on in the Netherlands the challenge comes in Exporting that to cities that are have no characteristics to the Netherlands Yeah, and so being mindful of what works and what doesn't work and Not to say that we can't go out on a limb to suggest something But when we do go out on a limb, we've got to say well be careful of this be careful of that and so that is a Element of PhD research, I think that is often underappreciated because You want to come up with all the answers to all the world now the whole world right now? And God bless your soul and your desire The most important thing for you to have is you know a drive in your heart for these types of questions I mean if you don't have a drive in your heart for these types of questions and trying to understand the complexity And then apply your brain to peel back this layer and that layer To look in through this crack and say okay now I've understood this situation and I'm going to Describe or explain the external validity of it as best I can to the research world so You got to be passionate you got to know the limitations of what you're trying to say and understand that Anything that's good in the past is going to have some sort of Reliability That people are going to say, huh? That's not the way that I thought the world works It's to change how other people see the world through the person With that do you have any other advice for young academics? Like I'm thinking myself like three years into the game out of a four-year PhD almost there Or if you're just starting out from a PhD is there any tips and tricks to get started? I think the first one that I just mentioned is having a passion having some sort of fire in your belly Research questions and you know the one that you come in for looking at the beginning of your PhD It's probably going to be Conservatively different than the one that you're actually doing three years into your PhD now I think this differs by program and context Nonetheless the second is to go for it Okay It's just go for it in every respect and then rely on your committee to Suggest okay. Well, maybe if you peel back this or leave out this part Maybe leave out this part. You'll have a more internally consistent research Contribution as opposed to Thinking more small. Yeah, it's smaller and saying well I'm going to think very carefully about this one issue I'm going to think very carefully about this issue and then after three or four years I'm going to try and piece them together and say whoa I didn't those don't match together So I thought that they do you're kind of stuck and then you're kind of stuck at that point So you got to go for it with respect to thinking aggressively thinking ambitiously about what you can do and then Start to assemble Hey, so Kevin, where can they find you and your work on the internet? Kevin jcrisick.org or a vehicle for a small planet vehicle for a small planet. Yeah, all right. Thank you Thank you very much so to learn more about Kevin Krijak and his most recent works check out the links below and Also, be sure to check out episode number three where I reviewed his paper urban design is our distinctive view from the bicycle Thank you very much, and I'll see you shortly. Thanks George