 I'd like to thank all of you for joining in today and before we begin I just wanted to give you a small overview of the agenda for the today's talk. We will start by introducing tree and then after that tree will be giving a presentation for about 20 minutes. That will be followed by a Q&A session, which will be for 30 minutes. And finally, we'll have some closing notes for about five minutes. All of you know tree and of course from the course. But let me give you let you know something a little bit more about him tray researchers the human experience of cycling and an iterative collaborative way of working in planning organizations. He is a co organizer of unraveling the cycling city book and planning the cycling city summer school. He's also the founder of design a bicycle user experience where he maintains an open toolkit of human centered design methods for cycling. Tray combines his design education from the new school of New York with an MSC in planning from the University of Amsterdam to provide an unique perspective and expertise in the field of cycling and urban design. The subject of trace talk today is about exploring an iterative way of working in the municipality. As demand for cycling rises, cities are scaling up their bison planning and infrastructure efforts. Many planning organizations are stepping into the new waters. There is a need to experiment learn and be responsive and iterative way of working is well suited to do this. This research explores what this way of working could look like. The bicycle planning context through the stories of practitioners in the municipality of Amsterdam's bicycle program. We conduct 12 semi structured interviews and two narrative interviews with process mapping exercises and latter and the latter of which explore one project in detail innovation at Alexander plan intersection. And how the way of working in the bicycle program and Alexander plan project demonstrates our characteristics practices and barriers and discusses the implications for planning and for cycling. So, I will hand it over to you trainer. Please start with your presentation. Thanks. Hi everyone. I'm excited to talk to you today. I hope this is also more of a discussion than a presentation. So mine will be a bit shorter than 20 minutes. And I have some questions I want you all to think about before. And I will show you those briefly. And I'm going to put in the chat box two links. One is to a presentation from earlier this year on the same paper. And one is the paper itself. So I'll put that in right now. This is to reference I'm not going to go over everything in this presentation, but essentially I'm going to report back on some on research on a special intersection in Amsterdam. Myself, I'm from the US. I'm from originally San Diego, California and lives in New York for four years, and then I've been in another ones for about two years. So this intersection is quite. It was new for me when I came here and it should be interesting for all of you. So I'm going to share the screen now. All right, I will start off with these questions. If everyone has everyone used men's meter before potentially. Basically it just helps us to see kind of crowdsource some responses from people. So I want to ask you guys, how and where do you learn about bicycle infrastructure. I'll give this a minute or two. I'm going to go to menc.com and put in this code. Participations optional I'm just curious to see what you guys were thinking about and then I can frame how this presentation will give you a different perspective, or perhaps an existing perspective. So here's the code 783425. We also have one more question after this. So it will give you the option to put in multiple answers for these and we will see what people say. All right. We'll put the code also in. See, all right click we're getting some responses in now. Soon I can you put the code and actually maybe I can get this. Yeah, I got this nice. The code is in the chat and for now while we're having people's responses come in, I'm going to show you the intersection that we're looking at today. So this is the intersection Alexander point. You look around, you can see what it is tram tracks, cars, cyclists people walking. This is what it looks like approximately today. Right now it's there are no traffic lights. And all these different modes interact. The primary user is people cycling. The large majority of people going through this intersection goes through so on the bike. And, but there are a good amount of trams. There's a low amount of cars and a low amount of people walking in Google Google. In Google Earth. All right. Soon as the audio quality okay still or Yeah, we can hear the drilling but it's all right. Yes, so hopefully if you guys if it gets bad, please let me know I will have to move but in the building I'm in there's there's been drilling not enough today. And with what's put on a beard is it's a yeah limited options here. So this is Alexander client. And if we go back a few years, you can see in 2000 and 16. You can see there are traffic lights. So over the course of several months, the municipality of Amsterdam did a pilot project where it had to collaborate with many different stakeholders across different groups within the city and outside of the city to test how they could improve traffic flow and interaction at this intersection. So these traffic lights are now gone. And people there remain yielding markings we can see on the on the street you can see these triangles sharks teeth they call them. These designate who has priority, but otherwise you have to use eye contact and social interactions navigates intersection now. All right, so let's go for and see some of these questions. Right so the first one here. Let's go. So the first question here where and how do you learn about bicycle infrastructure. It looks like literature is it's but there are also other things. This is interesting. All right, so it looks like yes going through manuals, local experience. Good case studies and a cycle and of course direct experience real world examples. So this will be a case today. I think it's interesting because today you will be seeing how a city which is known for cycle infrastructure is learning itself still on how to Well, improve the environment for cycling and it's learning by experimenting itself and that's what this paper in this presentation is about iterative way of working is doing something, seeing how goes evaluating it and moving forward from there. Does everyone see this new question coming up. I'd like to ask this one quickly. Yes, we do. Okay, hopefully comes up in the yes in your screens also. I will meet myself in the meantime. All right, well this is really interesting to see. Perhaps. I don't know if anyone's interested in the comments let me know if anyone wants to have like a screenshot of this later because I'm also curious for this. I didn't expect it wasn't well I didn't think that think this would be so cool to see all this stuff. But the reason I'm asking this question is because this is also very relevant to this research that I did, and we founded this iterative way of working is important for learning about cycle infrastructure but also implementing And influence we've seen may actually may not be the best word to use. Maybe it's not the most accurate but for now this is fine. So we see talking to stakeholders lobbying guidance documents side examples. I suppose in some way, the reason one reason why some of you may be here, listening for the answer dumb case is case study to talk to your local context about. So, it's interesting, great. I will move over to the presentation now. Okay, hold on screen sharing is the issue. Great. The title of this is collaboration experimentation and continuous improvement. You can read more about the research and the two links I put in the description before and this is a very quick overview. The municipality of Amsterdam is the large organization that I'm going to be talking about and within the municipality. I did interviews with people in the bicycle program, which is a cross cutting program program and project managers. And these people work with, why should actually mainly say program staff, they work with project managers across the city to enable project managers to incorporate cycling into their plans. So they don't per se have one. It's, it's, I should say it's central but it's also distributed. Next, even before the pandemic, there's been a growth and interest in cycling and something to think about now is that as lots of new governments want to incorporate cycling into their mobility. There's a lot of new things they have to think about, especially given the past several decades they've been thinking about how to optimize vehicle traffic. Now they will have to be thinking about new users on the road to cyclists here you can see in Paris it's quite insane some of the pictures we've seen social media of Paris. Temporary, maybe not temporary pop up like facilities in Berlin other places and in Mexico, a huge demand for bike shops. As people as planners have to expand cycling cycling infrastructure for a wider population. This learning is going to be important for them also for the organization and we will see this presentation case. Some of you may have heard of something called agile. It has some baggage. So I'm going to have to talk about what this means specifically. In a traditional way of working, you have a more formal linear working sequence, and you're trying to optimize something you already have a goal and you're working in a straight line towards this goal. And this quote unquote agile perspective, you are constantly reevaluating what you are trying to accomplish and how you should do this. And this is called double loop learning. And this is key. Other key characteristics are collaboration experimentation, hence the title of this presentation. This is the important thing to think about for this is this is more about principles. Some of the frameworks of agile working, which some people may know, such as scrum and this this research does not focus on those because those are those are not necessarily agile working those are frameworks and sometimes they can be commercial. And so this is not associated with that this is the approach to working, including these principles. All right. Some of these characteristics, you focus on people and interactions over processes and tools. Information drives decisions. You embrace conflicts and discussion, and you have more flexible interchangeable roles. In terms of practices you will have frequent collaboration between different roles in the product team and also with the customer. And in our case the customer is open for discussion as to what that is. And this research, we heard planners and designers say that their customers are politicians, stakeholders, other stakeholders, citizens, the people cycling. That's an interesting to think about. And other things frequent feedback and continuous testing and improving so this is what you will think about. This is the way of working that I'm researching in this. These are some barriers that literature have shown. That are barriers to natural way of working. And in these interviews we also explored with the workers, where and how they encountered these, such as management style organizational culture, existing technologies, top management supports shared understanding of what this way of working is. So big one. And we also go to the specific projects, the intersection I showed you here, where they removed the traffic lights, and they did this in a very, they did this in a set of actions, but they originally turned off the traffic lights and they, they're off. And they did interviews. They did traffic counts. They did video analysis. And eventually they took steps to get towards where they are today where there are no traffic lights. This was not a given this was an experiment and it ended up being an act of learning that's been applied to different intersections throughout the city. And if you're familiar with Amsterdam's geography, you can see here this is in the center of the city. So it's at a very high traffic cycling area. So, briefly, this is what we found with the municipality of Amsterdam in general. This is not a focusing on the Alexander plan intersection we found that's the manager's role in the collaboration are very important for balancing interest in stakeholders and for dealing with challenging conditions. Even here, there are dealing with limited time capacity, money, and many changes going on in the city. And collaboration was not easy. And it was perhaps possible because of certain people, but things like small working groups feedback, working across departments, and these agile practices, enabled to balance these different interests and stakeholders such as fire departments, police departments, other typical sort of stakeholders here. Yeah, local residents, people cycling who in this case were somewhat ignored even though they were a very large user group. And focusing on the Alexander projects specifically. These three themes are very, very connected. An interactive project strategy works very complimentary with legitimizing an intervention through analysis, meaning the city of Amsterdam had a test they turned off the traffic lights. And in conjunction with this, they were sure to monitor this qualitatively and quantitatively. And doing this together, it builds more consensus, it gave them tangible data to bring to other stakeholders. And the qualitative research especially gave stories, and the stories are another tool. The nature of the project made it possible to maneuver stakeholders and organizations. As people knew this was not necessarily permanent and it was based on if it would be beneficial, people weren't able to take baby steps. What this means for planners, essentially is understand your own working context and look for opportunities to intervene and think about the people in your organization. If you're looking to work in an iterative way, keep the focus on principles and goals, do not, the goal is not to be agile, so to say, is to learn and better serve citizens so be mindful of your language that you use and your interactions. What this means for planning organizations, we think this way of working is has potential to develop organizational capacity to facilitate a shift towards cycling. And in the case of Alexander applying which if you want to learn more about, you can see the full paper. There were benefits to only partially agile working so if we go back to those principles in the very beginning and that table. This is all not necessarily occurring here in Amsterdam. But the intervention still move forward and they're still learning through this and they've applied this to other intersections such as multiplying in the center as well. And they have a different way of looking at traffic now that's more based around social interaction in the center and lower speeds versus higher traffic speeds and using traffic lights to create order. So this has changed their perspective. Lastly, I will go to this learning cycle here so essentially experimentation lets you do all these things experimentation will help with learning. You gain more knowledge in your organization and as a professional, then you're able to iterate with this knowledge reflect and potentially experiments again. And you can see this is somewhat of a circle here. So if this is interesting, I'd recommend you look at the links. I will now go into human a one other thing is since I'm talking to people who are probably in the cycling fields. This is a current research I'm doing. If you are interested or actually if you have 15 minutes, I invite you and kindly ask you do this survey. This is around people centered design and we're trying to build a data set on how cycling can grow through people centered design. This link is here. I will put it in the chat box. If you have any questions, you can reach out to me. My contact info is here. And yes, as was mentioned at the beginning, so I do research at the Urban Staff Institute. I help organize some courses. And then I also work on my own sort of passing projects small business on the side. And this is a very much in line with the human centered design research that I'm, I just mentioned. And you can see more about the agile working here at this link. And I've also sent this presentation to soon a and a condo so they can share if anyone is interested in this afterwards. All right. Thank you. Yes. Can you keep the screen up for a minute. Yeah, please. Thanks very much for the presentation and giving us a brief overview of agile working. Some of you who might be from a computer science background might be familiar with agile working. It's a very nice way of working and reaching solutions to problems in an iterative way. So, please, if you have any questions, do type them out on the chat screen and we can ask them on your behalf to trade. Yes. In the meantime, I want to ask a couple of questions. The first question is how have Dutch engineers and urban planners been asked to work for some of the new emerging cycling capital such as Paris, for example. Interesting. Can you say that one more time my body quality was a bit bad. Yes. The question was, have Dutch engineers and urban planners been asked to work for some of the new emerging cycling capital such as Paris, for example. I think that's, yeah, interesting. I don't know if urban planners specifically are working there. I know there's lots of delicate, delicate groups that come to Amsterdam to learn from Dutch planners. And there's probably specifically, I don't know if there's transplants in other cities, but I definitely think the knowledge and ideas are spreading. Okay. We have another question. So, the question is, if you have a comparative municipal body, this all sounds brilliant. Unfortunately, in Melbourne, in Melbourne, local councils to not cooperate in general and find collaboration with cycling advocate groups and anathema. What do you suggest? Yeah, this is a really good point. The first thing that comes to mind for this is at one level you work with people. There are organizations and there are also people. I think an immediate step would be talking to people that are perhaps receptive and see more. Yes, so local councils should not cooperate in general. Yeah. This is very difficult because some of this stuff has to come from within the local council. As an advocate group, you can show some things like this, show the process of how this sort of learning works. You can suggest talking to people. I guess be mindful of your language is something I should say. Otherwise, this is very tough. Okay, so another question just came in. It says, with this consultative iterative approach, how do you reassure traffic engineers that their expertise is valued and they can change from cars to bike and walking without threatening their egos? This is another good one. In this case, I will say that a traffic engineer ended up taking on this project completely within municipality despite not initially being on it. Yes, they saw some of the results and they were very excited, but from the beginning they were not on. Once they were given ownership, that was very important and they were able to take it as their own. Once they're able to take it as their own, I think they can do a lot of cool things with that. Cars versus bikes and walking. Yeah, that's another subject. I think if you attempt it from that angle, that may not be very productive. I think getting shared goals and shared understanding of what you're trying to work towards, maybe what kind of street, what kind of city you're looking for is perhaps a bit more doable. Okay, another question is, what was the view of the public regarding the transformations that took place in that intersection? Really interesting, so it was very mixed. And I was part of the research group several years ago that gave well conducted interviews, sort of intercept interviews we called them were right before the intervention when we turned off the lights. We stopped people at red lights for 30 seconds and asked them very brief set of questions about how they proceed the intersection, how it would be different with capital lights or not. People hated the intersection before and they hated it less afterwards. I'm not sure that the hating part, I think it's a nice intersection, but it's busier, so perhaps for locals it's a bit much. In terms of others, so there were a few local people that had their own concerns and certain people had very loud voices. I think there was one or two people that were very concerned about children crashing the street without the traffic lights, which is very important concern. These were all collected along with the interviews. And it was, I think, important to make sure everyone was heard, but decisions were made collectively based on everything that was heard. Okay, we have a question from India and the question is, how do you engage the daily wage workers who are actually the regular cyclists in most of our cities into making safe aside when it's restructure. Any case studies or recommendations or suggestions on how to start the dialogue and develop it up into an activism group. Okay, here I think doing things simple as interviews, sharing people's stories is very powerful. There are lots of different ways to share stories, actually the sort of side project I have bicycle user experience and the link here has some tools for this. Any case studies or recommendations. You know your context best, you know who to talk to where it starts. In this site, I do have some tools that I try to make widely applicable. The main thing is making people visible. Like you mentioned the daily wage workers who are the regular cyclists. This is a very good point. These people often are not vocal, but they're very important part of the discussion. Similarly in Amsterdam. I don't remember the exact percentage of people who were cycling through but I think it was around, it was a very, very high number something like 70% or so model share in this intersection was cycling. But yet, these voices were not heard. The voices were other stakeholders that, you know, they had their own sort of loud interests. So I think I'm telling those stories, however you see fit in your context. Another really interesting question. The question starts with I've been recently looking into traffic calming measures and how in some cases, what is effective in making people drive drive slower seems to contradict classic traffic engineering know how was there any surprises in the project on how and how people responded to the changes and also were any additional measures such as traffic calming or signage required on the streets leading up to the intersection. So two things to take into account for this case is that already on a network level traffic volumes are lower than in more accommodated car excuse me car dominated cities, especially in city centers. There is already some traffic calming on streets surrounding the intersection. And speeds are also lower speed limits are lower. So this made it possible to much more, much more suited to turn off the traffic lights here in a place where you have mainly cars driving through at high speeds. That's not intersection where it's as practical to turn out the traffic lights. So, signage. This is interesting signage was not used here. In fact, all all the signage was removed. And this is a discussion points I think people are not excuse me people are not always. So, there are very mixed views on this, but the idea, excuse me the idea was to have social interaction, govern this intersection, meaning you have to look for people's bodily cues. How they're moving you have to look for how fast they're driving you sort of tell what is happening, and you decide whether you want to break or so. And it makes people be more attentive. And when you have traffic lights, people are obeying a perceived set of rules. So you have a new sort of social organization at the intersection where you have to be more engaged. Did that cover most of its. Yes, I think it did. I have another question that says, cities are implementing cycle lanes for a pilot period of one year, for example in Brisbane. How do you advocate and make this a permanent one when there are when there were hardly any cyclists using it during that period of time. This is difficult. There's the reason why you're asking is that there's no clear good answer here. There is a long term planning element that some planners and decision makers have to understand. In terms of making it politically acceptable I would say telling the stories of people are using it saying the impact that it has it. I imagine it does have some impact on some people. Keep those stories visible. But yeah there's going to be some long term vision needed from people that are working on these cycle lanes as well. And it perhaps try them somewhere else take any momentum to try pilots in different places and be aware the pilots are not. They're the pilots so they're probably not perfect see what you can learn from these pilots how you can change them over time. And other thing with the powers I think it's quite interesting when citizens get more involved in these. Ideally, there is some citizen needs or wants for cycle lanes somewhere. But with those where there is the need there will be people talking for you and it's much easier to amplify their voices when you have them pushing for this already. Another question my current challenge is to persuade the municipality to first think fully and in long term with the help of consulting engineers and then go for infra implementation. They just want something fast and implement 80 kilometers of infra in just one year. And I think this approach will result in more problems and reduce the acceptance of biking manner of residence. How long did it take for you to think about and then apply the changes in Alexander plan was intersection. So for context the scale that you're talking about is much larger than this Alexander plan project. So, yes, keep that in mind. This is one intersection 80 kilometers, if I'm seeing that right is yeah, quite a bit. It's also exciting. So congratulations. But yes, I think that's a good point. Perhaps it results more problems if it's not thought through and reduces the acceptance so in this case, the intervention happened over a period of months. So they had an additional an initial research period for a few weeks where we did interviews in the street we did traffic counts to assess the initial situation. Later in the summer. We took a few months to turn off traffic lights and do an initial evaluation. Yes, initial excuse me additional evaluation. From there decision makers will think about it, and only from there afterwards, they decided few months later if they wanted to over the course of the year or so, fully remove the traffic lights. So the learning period was several months, maybe around half of a year. There's more documentation online if you're interested if you Google this intersection. A colleague of mine Meredith laser has also talked a good amount about it as well. She coordinated the study. Yes, but then the permanent infrastructure, the actual physical or moving of the traffic lights took a little while afterwards. It was not immediately they didn't just take it down because these are not cheap things to do. Okay, I want to think more about your question for the 80 kilometers of infrastructure. It sounds like it's also a lot of different contexts, perhaps, so that infrastructure will be different in different contexts. I do think the storytelling component is still important to this course I'm biased because this is my, my sort of specialty. But regardless of where you are should be very clear whether infrastructure is effective or not based on how people experience the infrastructure. The question was very extra funding to survey people on the intersection and assess each stage of the project. How was this gained and supported and was it seen as cost effective transport planning. Really good question and there should be more on this in the paper. There should be it's been a little while since I've seen this but essentially this was meant to be a very quick cost effective intervention. Just put the switch, turn off the traffic lights should be simple, right? But because of the time it took to talk to all these different stakeholders ended up being more expensive in terms of personnel. So it was not super easy or cost effective before the intervention actually happens and before the initial evaluation happens. There were months and months of discourse between the bicycle program staff and different stakeholders such as the public transport authority fire department, etc. So this was funded I suppose as a normal staff time. This is just taking their own time. So that's, yeah, I can't give a number on that but that's what it is and funding itself. So they did hire an outside company to conduct the traffic counts and the more quantitative analysis and they hired a team from the University of Amsterdam to do the qualitative analysis. So there was some funding for this the that evaluative work is also learning work. So it wasn't seen necessarily as just for that's interesting intersection. Yes, so in that way it's cost effective learning but is it as a one cost effective intervention. No, because of the amount of stakeholders involves the next question is I think has a really interesting point of view. Was there any change in road safety at the junction before and after the scheme, people often fear that something will be unsafe, but there's fierce, but the first group to be ungrounded. Yes, so short answer. No, there was actually no change. There was not more or less dangerous. Yeah, I'm short answer. I should say also think about what you want to define as road safety and think about how it connects also to a network level if you have more people walking and cycling. There's much less of a chance for fatal accidents. So that's often not thought about in larger debates to but in terms of specifically at this intersection, there was, I believe, no reduction, or very, very minor change that was not significant in crashes here. But often between people cycling the crashes are more minor and they're not. If they were to happen, they're not as. Yeah, they're not fatal, for example. If you have more information, if you search this online, I don't think that specific thing is in the paper, but online there's, yeah, Meredith Guardian article, among others have some more information on this. So another question says in the Alexander Klein project, can it be that the whole idea worked because of the people's attitude many car drivers are bikers too. Yeah, look, so there's there's conflicts happening here. It's part of this way of working. You have to accept this conflict and work with it. I don't think everyone wanted this in the beginning. If you go now, people may actually forget that there used to be traffic lights, depending on who you talk to. But yeah, actually, because so many people cycling had to stop and they didn't want to stop at the traffic lights, many people were happy, but there were some that were not. Many car drivers are bikers too. Yes. And they're in this area. There are few hard people driving cars in general. Yeah. Okay, so then we have another question that says in India many municipalities are cash crunched. The limited budget and the contribution of automobile sector to the Indian economy and mobility makes them spend the limited money on building more roads. Do you have any recommendations to change this in what ways can cycling be made profitable to the municipalities in such cities? Yeah, cycling costs less to build for cycling can use asphalt roads just as cars can use asphalt roads, but much less maintenance is required for these roads. So in this case, they're a cost effective. To mention, they're also much more accessible. If you want to reach more people, more people are able to ride a bike versus not everyone can afford to have a car. Wow, there's a lot of messages. Oh my gosh. Yes. I can take a little bit of time afterwards to answer some of these if needed. I don't know. It's like we have like 10 minutes left. I'll let you decide soon in. If you want to do this, we got we got time we can we can extend the session. Yes, in any case, if there were some questions that were left hanging. How can they contact you and ask the questions. Yes, so if you prefer email, my emails here. If you want to just connect in general, I'm on LinkedIn. Also designing a bicycle user experience and urban sector Institute are on these social media platforms. Great. Okay, so we have another question that says, was communication given to business owners residents and community entities informing the neighborhood about the change in expectations prior to the experiment. Prior to the, when the experiment occurred. Yes, I believe so. So I don't have the same level of insight as the actual planners that did this because I was a researcher. But from what I heard, yes, there's communication. Okay, thank you. Another question is one of the major hurdles that has to be faced is engaging shop owners and retailers along the proposed bicycle network where they propose cycle lanes and remote parking. Have you got any examples and any ideas for engagement. Yeah, I think this is a, so from the perspective of this research, I'm not extremely useful for this question. However, this is from what I hear a very common problem. And there are solutions out there that do show that's, well people cycling and certain studies shop more. You have less space you can fit more people, more people that cycle as customers versus someone parking. Some of this is, I think, personal communication, depending on who you're going to talk to you have to know how to approach someone. Everyone is receptive to different things in different way, and really sort of mastering this art of storytelling and Yeah, and their personal interaction I think it's important. Yeah, I don't have a perfect answer for that one. Okay, then we have more of a clarification question. The question says tactical urbanism has been much discussed during the pandemic as a way of trying out changes to road infrastructure on a quick low cost basis to try things out before trying them. Trying to make them permanent. This sounds consistent with your approach is this correct. And then there's another question that says if there was no change to safety after the traffic lights were turned off. What was the principal benefit where traffic flows substantially improved was the change worthwhile. Great questions. The first one is yes absolutely tactical organism is very much in line with this way of working. And yes, they're very complimentary. Was there if there was no change to safety. Yes, the principal benefit was, I think twofold. So what is traffic close were substantially improved for people cycling they no longer had to stop at the stop lights. And because it was an intersection with the majority people cycling it was not made for them traffic lights are for to regulate car flow. People people cycling are able to interact on their own. So what's the change worthwhile. Sorry, the second two folds was the social interaction happens between people at the intersection seems to be a different way of looking at traffic in general. Whereas one way of looking at traffic is you have to move objects through space based on hard rules hard engineering rules. This perspective was people can negotiate with each other together through social interaction. So this insight was very important and it's helped municipality redesign other intersections that prior were very tricky to solve. And but because now they have this new perspective they can do things they never thought it before. We're not limited to a very strict set of rules and this is in line with what I mentioned before was, I can actually bring this back here. Yeah, double loop learning. This is when you reconsider the the boundaries that are, well, instead of trying to optimize something you reconsider what you're trying to do in the first place. So this enabled the municipality to do this. So, yes, I mean, everything is all these interventions are either worthwhile you have to choose a metric he wants to base it on to decide whether it's worthwhile but based on those two things it was very worthwhile. Then we have another question that says, when we talk about an agile way of working in the context of urban planning. How do you decide on the duration of each iteration. This is a good question. So my view on this is, there are more stricter frameworks, such as scrum or. There's the app. So my point is these frameworks are necessarily, they're not necessary to follow because the frameworks often distract you from your actual goal, you may you have to decide for yourself how long you want to take for these in this case. It was a few months. Maybe the local conditions will ask you to change how long it is. But the point of this way of working is that you don't need to tie yourself into stone immediately. As you learn you will have more information as to what is the best way for you to go. If you have an idea now you can easily set something arbitrarily and change it later. But yeah, there's no, I'm not advocating for any certain amount of time. So another question about two very specific commuting or groups. How does this intersection serve emergency services and disabled users? Yes. So this was an important part to incorporate into the decision as well. Disabled users. Yeah, so I can't speak specifically to, I'm not a disabled user, and I think it's important to hear from people themselves, how they move through the intersection. It seemed to pass the tests that were needed. In general in Amsterdam there are issues with with streets being the disabled user sort of friendly or accommodating. And that's something I think that needs to be addressed. But this intersection, it was so, yeah. And I think this is also a discussion we have to have a bit wider as well. When you have no traffic lights, things are somewhat more, they're definitely less predictable. And if you are blind, or if you're in a wheelchair or something else, you will move through this intersection in a different way. There's personal responsibility on all of us to interact with people that are blind or disabled or any other sort of stability with respect and safety through intersections. If we have traffic lights, I guess my sort of framing here is if we have traffic lights, you have very hard rules that they dissolve responsibility of people if they follow these rules. If someone in a car is driving and they follow the traffic light but they happen to hit someone, they say it's okay. If we don't have traffic lights, everyone has to be responsible for moving slowly through this intersection and interacting with each other. I went totally around your question, but I want to encourage it. Yeah, it's sort of a different way of thinking about this. Who was the second group in addition to the disabled. The emergency services. Yeah, so in terms of that, that's a little more straightforward. Yes, emergency services were able to access this intersection as needed. They were consulted in the beginning. But yeah, before the intervention and throughout this evaluation, they're also satisfied with the, yeah, with everything. Okay, well thank you very much, Trey. We run out of time for the questions. So the questions that are still coming in, we will collect them and send them to Trey. So if you have any more questions, please write them down now and we can send them to him. And if you have any more questions afterwards, please remember that you can always write Trey as he said before. Okay, so that's it from me today. Yeah, is it also easiest. I know it's hard to get in touch with people after this zoom meeting so perhaps, yeah, if they send me personal personal question they can constantly email or LinkedIn. Yeah, or I think that's probably easiest what do you guys think. Yeah, I think the email is the easiest way I think. Yeah, I agree. Email would be the best way to contact Trey. Also is I think you have hope you guys have noted down his contact details for LinkedIn. And please do follow up with him if you have any more questions or anything that you would like to discuss with him. And with this, I'd like to thank you all for joining for today's session. Before we go, I just wanted to introduce the rest of the team that's working hard to bring these sessions to you. That includes me, Artem, who's from Berlin, who's also there on today's session he's from Buenos Aires, Argentina. And we also have two new mentors on the team. This session, which is Yasmin and Anna, and some of you might be familiar with them on the Spanish language sessions. I'm also excited to announce our next session, which is going to be on Thursday 22nd of October at 1400 UTC. It's going to be a virtual cycle tour of Amsterdam by a Meridith placer. And with in your email invites that you might have received before for this session. There's a link to a video of the cycle tour. And I'd really appreciate it if you can take the time out and watch the video before you come on the sessions because it will give you a better perspective on what she's going to talk about and also help you ask questions. It's fairly long, about 40 to 15 minutes now, so we won't have, we don't have the time to to to broadcast it during the session itself. Please do follow us on an Instagram or Urban Cycling Institute, or also join our telegram group. And with that, I'd like to thank you all again for joining. And I hopefully will see you guys for the next session. Thanks. Bye bye.