 Hello everyone and welcome to the spokes podcast today. We're in Meredith Glazer's cargo bike And we're gonna talk to you about a little bit about what we're gonna do here at the Urban Cycling Institute So welcome to the show Meredith. Thank you. Thanks for having me. This is great This is my first time doing a ride cast. All right, so we'll see how well I can actually concentrate on talking talking to somebody while while riding and And having a guest in my cargo bike. Yeah, this is quite the crazy thing. So we're coming up into one of my favorite intersections because it was part of this desire lines analysis and So back in 2012, I think it was the city and a couple of partners Analyzed a couple of intersections and they found that Bicyclists were using the intersection in a very interesting way. You know, they weren't using the infrastructure per se. Yeah, and So what they did was they took those results and Right where that guy is standing behind behind you over there. Yeah, right there Yeah, so there used to be a protective island right there. Look at the size of that thing That's probably like seven meters across. It's huge. It's seven meters across. It's huge And maybe even more than that. I mean, it's a huge area. They took out the the protective island To make a lot of more space for cyclists And all the engineers were really nervous about doing that because of course You know, it's a protective measure and yeah, they want to make sure that everybody's safe But they took it out and and It was it was a success and so from the technical standpoint, you know, it was there are more cyclists could go through the green light and And Delay in that way was sort of reduced I guess, but it also made just so much more space. So in the morning peak There's just so many cyclists right at that intersection. I think something like 2000 in the in the morning, you know, it's just and then Throughout the whole day, there's something like 30,000 cyclists crossing that intersection. So it's pretty impressive. So that's a good example of research working with The government and consultancies to to make these innovative ideas happen So what kind of partners did you work with the city of Amsterdam? It was the city of Amsterdam. I think yeah, another traffic engineering consulting firm At Copenhagen I was on that yeah project and then the University of Amsterdam. All right. Yeah, so that's a big consortium And you know, I would like to see more of this happen where where researchers can really collaborate and bring their expertise to make something happen and especially in the Local neighborhoods, yeah, right and and contribute something back to the community. Yeah, that's really cool You also worked on a similar type project Where they took out all the traffic lights? Yeah, should we ride over there? I mean we could do have time Yeah, we could only another five minutes or something. All right But yeah, that was a really interesting project. That was two years ago at Alexander Plain when The bicycle program manager called me up and said hey Meredith, we're gonna do this pilot over at Alexander Plain we're gonna shut off the lights for two weeks and They already had hired a traffic engineering consultancy firm to To look at baseline and intervention, you know safety and delay and throughput and all the sort of technical Facets and what they wanted from us was to actually talk to bicyclists themselves So I got a team together of I think it was seven of us And we had video recorders I designed a sort of script and protocol for interviewing cyclists so intercept interviews and We interviewed At baseline so before the pilot before the traffic lights were shut off. We interviewed about 200 cyclists amazing, yeah during peak morning and evening rush and We asked them a couple questions. We asked them one, you know, what do you think of this traffic the intersection? We we also asked them do you think the lights are necessary? And then Wave bumps, yeah Do you think the lights are necessary and then? What do you think would happen if the lights were were shut off? So it was an interesting mix of results about Almost a hundred percent of the cyclists did not Like the intersection like with the traffic lights. Yeah with the lights on like people people really complained a lot they said, you know, it's too busy and people are are angry with each other and And And oh, they said things like the lights are always green at the same time Which we know that doesn't happen. Yeah, but it just felt like it just felt like that happened and Then And then they also said the lights are absolutely necessary So something like 80% I think said that you know without the traffic lights there will be chaos and So so that was a really interesting result and and then we went away for a Week or two weeks and then the pilots began so the lights they just shut the lights to a to a yellow blinking and We let it We let it settle for a couple days before doing the intervention Interviews and this time it was a lot more difficult to actually get the interviews because people were flowing, right? So we could easily get people when they were stopped at the red light, right? But during during the experiment it was it was difficult to get through it to run after people yeah But we got about 170 People of all different ages, you know, it was a very mixed mixed group And then we asked them some different questions We asked them one. Have you noticed? Did you notice that the lights had turned off? And then we asked them, you know, what what do you think? Yeah, and Again, we had some really interesting results For the first question if they noticed it actually 10% Did not even notice that the lights had changed the light situation like they didn't notice that there were the traffic Lights were all gone. No, they weren't all gone. They were just flashing So that was really interesting and it actually correlated really well because the technical Results showed that 10% ran the red light Wow, okay. So there were people who were there on most days just perhaps already doing this negotiating behavior Yeah And then we asked them, you know, what do you think of it? And it's not that everybody loved the intersection. It's that people like people disliked it less okay, and our conclusions were were We had a couple conclusions one was That there was a learning curve to this new situation, right That people were a bit uncomfortable With with negotiating a light on their own, yeah and It wasn't rainbows and unicorns, you know, it wasn't like oh, let's turn off the traffic lights and everybody's going to have a great time You know, no, there's actually a lot of Cognitive and neurological functions going on in your brain You know these processes that are happening in your brain that you when you negotiate in a situation That's new and that has that that is learning, you know learning takes time Yeah The other the other main conclusion was that social interaction Overall increased right from the before situation So people were using verbal gestures nonverbal gestures At an increased rate. They were also using eye contact at an increased rate and This was also the case between not only between cyclists and cyclists, but between cyclists and drivers as well And we also noticed that a lot of drivers would give would give priority using these gestures To cyclists even though they didn't have to kind of like what happened to us back there Right that so there was There was this sort of There was just an interesting social interaction going on taking place that just didn't take place beforehand and Yeah, we're not really sure like why or how this happens But maybe there are certain spaces that we can play with in our cities that that can allow for this type of social interaction and Again, it doesn't have to be positive, right? It doesn't necessarily have to be positive interactions, but Interactions can also just be can be difficult, right? Yeah, so Yeah Cool, I'll write it now. We'll write it. We'll go through the intersection and and we'll show you how it works Yeah, well actually, it's might be interesting to point out that since that it two years ago since that experiment two years ago The city then physically removed the traffic light infrastructure Oh, it's totally gone now. You can't even tell it was there. Yeah. Yeah, and then they it went through a whole redesign process as well So when what they also did was they shifted the priorities. So now whereas before Like I said car drivers would would sort of give give way to cyclists now they have to Yeah on that same stretch so So maybe now there's even less interaction Interesting because now cyclists have the priority right there. Yeah, and who knows if these interactions are meaningful You know there would we didn't we didn't collect data from Here we are using it. Uh-huh. Whoa. Here. We are. Yeah. Okay. So this is this is there used to be four Traffic lights one on each corner. Yeah, and now as you can see it is all gone and Actually, if you if you look at these tiles closely, you can even see Where they filled in the tiles. Yeah, where the traffic lights used to be. Yeah So there used to be a huge again protective island right here on this corner. Oh, look at that Yeah, and this is that's gone and there used to be another protective island on the other corner We'll go around it again. This is amazing. It's sort of like a Non-roundabout roundabout. Yeah Because you can just keep going around and around and almost all of it is Cyclists and there's lots of stuff going on here. Yeah. Yeah, okay See he was supposed to yield. Yeah, but didn't I guess I guess in practice things always That was fun. Okay