 Hello everyone and welcome to the ninth episode of Cycling Research Review and in today's episode we ask the question what can we learn about studying 15 cyclists in the city of Utrecht in the Netherlands. Now since this paper was written in 2013 they've actually built the Daphne Schriftersbruch which is a new bridge that's only for pedestrians and cyclists that run on the roof of a primary school you've probably seen pictures of it and that now provides the connection between these two neighborhoods. So it's kind of interesting to kind of roll back the clock a bit and see what the situation was back in 2013 when they were actually building a new railway bridge connection and to see how the situation now defers and have changed to the present day. So in this paper the authors really explore this idea of scentscapes as it relates to cycling. They actually do this and study in a very qualitative manner and their methodology is to recruit 15 participants doing a ride along and to use both video and also GPS to record what happens during the route so the researcher goes along with the study participant and from this we get some very unconventional data points so instead of simplifying each aspects of the experience and trying to aggregate it quantitatively what we've done here is I see direct quotations being used from each of the participants so they're able to really add depth into what cycling experience is especially in the context of the Netherlands and they talk about how the city is interpreted differently between urban planners and the people who experience the city on bike so when we think of urban planning it's usually in terms of a top-down map in terms of political boundaries in terms of infrastructural boundaries so we think highways railroads rivers and and where does the city border ends but what this paper by van Dupen and Speerings presents to us is a very different idea of borders itself so how people experience going from home to workplace and where along that route they do they experience boundaries it could be in the form of a bridge it could be in the form of the smell of a coffee shop it could be a familiar street and one participant here even denotes a intersection as a final border between being on the way to work and finally getting to work so right traffic engineers use lights as a device to maintain the choreography of the intersection but it could also be a space for waiting it could also be a space for people thinking about their day or or just using it as a boundary to be like this is the last red light we have to get to before we get to work so I'll take a quote from the paper they talk about participants and how their experiences and they say many participants spoke about switching mentally between home and work during the journey they often related a specific part of the trajectory with being occupied with what do I need to do at work today or with going into evening mode after work cycling help them digest the day after about 15 minutes of physical activity to clear their mind others have pointed out this as a place to think and as a space to plan the day so people are really you making use of this active commuting time to serve a mind clearing function they also illustrate the more physical ways that cyclists kind of use the city and are creative with the infrastructure and the surroundings given to them they make creative use through detours or unsanctioned shortcuts through the grass for example and they also negotiate with other cyclists so for example one of the the people interviewed said that they sometimes are forced to run red lights because if you don't run a red light then the other cyclist would run into you from behind so to maintain the flow you're sometimes even forced to break the rules and they touch briefly on the idea of route choice which is how people pick which road they go on and here they illustrate with two pictures top and bottom so the top one you see is a very residential quiet route and then the bottom one is what the city has designated as as the main cycle route and as you can see it's they're two very different cycling experiences and here even the participants bring in I'll refer back unpack the idea of urban design and how that can contribute to building better cycling environments is that here the participants themselves even mentioned ideas of how they're enclosed within a space about how a space is quieter about how the different elements of urban design and not just the infrastructure also serve to make their route more pleasant so it turns out that the cyclist experience of the city and the neighborhood boundaries are in fact shaped by audio visual kinesthetic and even their their sense of smell right and and von Dupen and Speer and writes commuting trajectory is divided and connected in multiple ways transcending the planners priority to overcome infrastructure lines as main dividers of the neighborhood and the city in Utrecht this is not to say that the constructed bridge over the canal or the tunnel encapsulating motorway cannot smoothen connections and create a more compact city however such an approach seems to forget about the already existing connections and to marginalize the other divisions of importance by quantitatively exploring the individual experience of cycling now we see this being an extension of perhaps the idea that Kevin Kragich and and Forseth presented in their paper you know is there a distinctive view from the bicycle so now the researchers here have actually went and taken this view from the bicycle from the researchers perspective but also from the participants perspective and explored how everyday commuters take this view from the bicycle and it seems here that there's there's quite a clear distinction here between the view of drivers and also pedestrians in the city and how that's distinct from things that cyclists pick up on for example when they talk about cresting up a hill onto the bridge I find that interesting because you don't feel it the same way in a non-wheeled mode so when you're walking it's actually not a very steep grade up the bridge and when you're driving you just kind of step on the gas and it doesn't bother you so this is a kinesthetic experience and in other ways because you're also moving faster the scenery changes at a much faster rate and for example this passing through this smell of coffee that happens relatively quicker on the bicycle as compared to walking where that moment would drag on for much longer I do wonder if it is possible to or desirable to capture these experiences perhaps quantitatively so how do we translate these perspectives from the cyclists into ideas on how to build our cities for example we've been able to capture or models the dislike that people have for hills but how do we then recapture that sense of exhilaration that some of these participants mentioned when coming down the other end of the hill and some of them mentioned climbing this hill as a as a weekly challenge something that well not if they don't look forward to but as giving them a sense of accomplishment how do you capture in our utility models of the smell of coffee the coffee shop for example or this feeling of getting to work or this feeling of arriving home after a long commute so I think this paper serves to illustrate the diverse dimensions of experience that we have all cycling and how it's not simply positive or negative and it's not simply fitted into a model so whereas we have time distance you know time waiting at a traffic light we can even have hills weather in the model it is hard to capture these things like a smell of coffee or I mentioned here the cheeriness of a yellow bridge so perhaps after reading this paper I do think there is a larger role for urban designers to play in the design of cities that cater to cycling and I think this is a case because a lot of these things that people have mentioned in this paper are in fact unique and and very specific to their specific commute situation so it's it's not it's not that these urban design elements can be exactly replicated and maybe that's a good thing maybe having unique landmarks unique smells unique gradients are all factors that contribute to what makes cycling so special but it is also clear here that the authors acknowledge that this is in the context where cycling is very normal so social problems like the stigmatization of cycling or or how people see themselves in relation to society as a marginalized group doesn't really apply here in the Dutch context so where are the biggest insights that we can gain from this study well the authors mentioned two points one is that the boundaries of what urban planners think are there on a map don't exactly match up with how each individual person experiences the city so there's actually many different boundaries according to who you are and what your interaction and what your business and what your movement patterns around the cities are and number two is that I think it's a very complicated issue on how do we turn the variety of experiences this was just 15 people so if you can imagine an interview is 30 50 100 people that we would get ever more diversity in how people experience the city so how do we turn that diversity into a useful conclusion and the conclusion is perhaps to illustrate that there is this diversity there is this depth of experience that is not being captured in the current traffic based model of how we do things that the smell of coffee is unique that if you see a yellow bridge or an intersection it's it's more than just a physical structure it all of these things come together to have meaning and meaning is created by slices of a journey so we we take these moments in time and we piece them together and then we call that a trip and finally it's to reconceptualize this idea of cycling skills what does it mean to be an experienced cyclist for example if you know all the shortcuts in your neighborhood does that mean you have a lot of experience of a cyclist or if you know how to choose the best routes that suit what you want from your commute that particular day does that mean you have a lot of experience as a cyclist we tend to think of experience as purely the physical as being able to navigate through a chaos of traffic but if that chaos of traffic doesn't really exist there and the chaos we're dealing with is really other cyclists and other pedestrians then these other navigational skills become much more important it becomes a matter of how do you find your favorite route and how do you interpret your own landscape and how do you create the best journey from home to work to the grocery store using the urban layout that you have so these all raise very interesting questions that I hope are thought-provoking for urban planners and also urban designers alike and we'll keep building on this theme this theme of experience and how the sense scape contributes to everyone's journey of the city of the city coming up in these next episodes so thank you for joining me for episode 9 of cycling research review and I will see you next Tuesday hit the subscribe button below if you want to hear more from me next week and I'll see you then