 It's 1969, and this is the Hilton Hotel in Amsterdam. Some of you might know this picture. We are looking at John Lennon and John Lennon. John Lennon and John Lennon were just married, and they came to Amsterdam on their honeymoon. And during their honeymoon, they really wanted to come to Amsterdam because Amsterdam at the time, 1969, was the place for youth movements and counterculture, and especially Joko Ono wanted to be there. And when they were there, they decided to protest for world peace. And if I have one advice for you, if you want to protest, do it like them. They stayed in bed for seven days. So they were in the Hilton Hotel in bed for seven days, and all kinds of people came to their bed. Journalists, people from the counterculture movement as well. And this is one of the iconic pictures where you see the stuff that they were bringing to Joko Ono and John Lennon. You can see on this picture a pigeon, a white pigeon in a cage. I think you can all understand why it's related to their cause of world peace. But there's also, and probably you all have seen it by now, there's a white, rickety, old Dutch man pike on the bed. Single speed, backpedal brake, painted white. So the question that I want to ask you and want to discuss with you about is why were John Lennon and Joko Ono in bed with a bicycle? And what does that have to do with our work in thinking and doing research about cycling, and what the cycling research board meeting can be? Because the position that we take, the perspective that we have, has everything to do with the language that we speak. And we have been using language because that's what humans do during these last two days to talk about cycling and mobility. And Donella Meadows, a great thinker, taught me that that matters. That the language we use is not a mirror of reality. It's not an objective way to measure things to collect data. But the data we collect, the language that we speak, represents worldviews, values, rationalities that underlie it. So the language that we speak, that you speak, that I speak, is not a mirror of reality. It profoundly shapes what we see, what we do not see, which problems we identify, what data we collect, what counts as evidence and what doesn't count as evidence. And in the end, what kind of world we are shaping. So the language that we use shapes the world. It is not only a description of it. So how does this work? Well, I brought an example of a thing that I always make huge mistakes with. So you have to help me here. I have an app group. What's the app group with my neighbors? And in the app group, I sometimes send pictures, normal pictures. But I always forget one thing. And I always get a personal message about the mistake I made. Because one of my neighbors, my neighboring neighbor actually, she is blind. And I always forget that. So we have a conversation on the app group about the picture I shared. And then there's always a personal message saying, Marco, you did it again. You shared a picture. Everybody's talking about it. But I have no clue what I'm looking at. So can you give me a short description of the picture? So who wants to help me? There's no wrong answers here. A road crossing the forest. Help me here. Or help my neighbor. How would you describe this picture? An autumn picture. It has rains, even. It's a deer in the middle of the... Or it's a road in the middle of the deer. Yeah, I see what you did there. So if you asked this question, actually what you're doing now, all of you, even if you're not speaking it, you're using your brain to make language. And with the language, you simplify reality. Because I did this two weeks ago. I asked this to an audience. And one of the audience members started to see the trick. And he said, he was trying to describe this picture in its full complexity. And after two minutes, I stopped him because it was getting a bit boring. But the point also was you will not be able to do that. Even such a simple picture as this, you cannot describe in its full complexity. You need language to simplify reality. And to talk about it. But doing that, making that simplification of this picture, you're also, by definition, are making choices. You cannot escape that. So you can talk about this picture as being a deer crossing the road. And you can talk about it as a road crossing their habitat. And the key point here is that there's no way to say that one of these statements is more valid than the other. Both are simplifications of reality. Both make choices. And both make us see certain things and make other things less visible. But they're both as valid as the other. But, as Tonella Meadows told us, the choice that we make here then defines the reality that we will shape. Because it will define what problems we see and what solutions we think about. So we need to put that in central stage if we want to understand how we are observing reality and shaping a future reality. So before I'm going into the mobility, the best example to explain how this works is the forest. And this comes out of a book by James Scott, 1998, Seeing Like a State. And he uses the forest to describe basically the same steps. He says to govern things, you need to simplify as well. You need indicators. You need evidence. You need data. We all heard it here before. And you need that to make decisions. But to do that, you simplify and make certain choices. And he shows how this works and shapes reality with the example of the primeval forest. The primeval forest is a very complex ecosystem. All kinds of feedback loops, all kinds of dynamics over time, created a habitat that serves many different goals. In this primeval forest, you can hunt, you can hide, you can build nests, you can play, you can grow. And that's why the primeval forest is an ecosystem that offers a living environment for many different species of animals, plants and trees. But this radically changed in the end of the 18th century. James Scott describes how at that time, wood became a very important resource, a fuel, a building resource. And people that owned land were thinking about how to make more efficient use of their land to do this wood, makes sense, right? So a whole new academic domain was created. And the academic domain we now know is scientific forestry. The scientific foresters, the academics at the time, were mainly German academics. And they created a concept to simplify this question. So they created what they called the normalbaum, the standard tree. And the standard tree was sort of a concept to think about the ideal typical tree that you need in a forest for optimal wood production. Fast forward, owners of forests started to use that concept to slowly adapt their forest towards more and better wood production. And that brings us from the primeval forest to the production forest. And in the production forest, what you see here is two rows of standard trees, two rows of normalbaum, which are all the same age, the same size, the same species for wood production. But you can already see, so try to hide here, try to hunt, try to build a nest, try to play. So this forest became relatively well for wood production, but by doing that, by simplifying the forest, it also excluded all the other goals. And species, especially small animals, disappeared from our production forest. And the tragic element here is that the production forest happens to not even be more efficient in wood production, because through the simplification, it became very vulnerable. It lost its robustness, and it became very vulnerable for weather events, diseases, and things like beetles. It's another beetle, it's not John Allen. In the middle of Germany, I went to a forest, the huts area, and 50% of all the trees are currently dead because of one species of beetle. Okay, so what does this have to do with us? I would argue that we follow the same logic with our streets. This is the primeval street. 1920, 100 years ago, these were the streets in our cities. And streets at that time were seen and conceptualized as the remaining space between buildings, as, for instance, Richard Sennett describes. And this remaining space was also a place of dynamic feedback loops, where over time, many different goals were served. If you look at the street, you see people trading, selling, buying stuff. You see people that used the street to meet each other in the space between buildings. It became sort of a public living room. You see children playing there, and you see people traveling through the street. And this all happened over millennia in different cities around the world in a relative balanced feedback loop complex system. This also changed. And exactly 100 years ago, because of a new innovation that entered our streets. And innovation was not so much only the car or the automobile, but it was the massive introduction of the car and the speed and the mass and the size that it brought to that street. It literally collided with all the other goals of the streets. And in the beginning, you can read about that in Peter Norton's book, Fighting Traffic. It's a great book that shows what happened in that decisive decade. In the beginning, this conversation was a conversation about justice. What should we do with this new innovation that's literally killing thousands of children that were playing on the street? And at first that conversation was a conversation in the language of justice. It was seen as completely unjust. In the 1920s, nobody would say that the car would be a dominant feature on the streets of our future cities. Not even the car industry. But only in 10 years time, this conversation changed. And a new language was developed. A language which was centered around efficiency, control and the freedom of the individual car driver. And that all happened in 10 years time. Ladies and gentlemen, it is the 1930s. We are in the United States of America and traffic engineering was born. Because traffic engineering didn't exist. Traffic engineering became the solidified version of the new language that we were going to speak about the street. Okay, so that's 90 years ago we were developing this new language. And that coincided with this whole logic of not only seeing the street as a primeval street that had to be more of a production street, but also the city and society that needed to become more of a machine. An efficient machine that would lead to economic growth and economic growth would lead to the fact that nobody should ever be hungry any longer. This is Le Corbusier looking from above as an expert and academic in the city as he literally said, a more optimal rational machine. And he literally stated that the street in that machine is only a place to shuttle people as efficiently as possible from A to B. Optimize the machine. Marginalize the human. And this logic started to solidify over time. A new language, choices, simplifying reality, but it solidified. It solidified into norms to think about streets. It solidified into guidelines. It solidified into transportation models. It solidified into institutions. It solidified into laws and into behavior. Literally, it solidified into the asphalt, the concrete and the steel that we see outside. And finally, and this is a very great book written about this by Ivan Ilyich in the 70s, it solidified our imagination. So the choices we made in the 30s to talk about the street in a different way, those choices are taken for granted. We no longer see that they are choices. That's the radical monopoly. One of the key mechanisms to give academic evidence to this new field of transportation engineering and planning was the setup of the TRB. At first, it was called the National Advisory Board on Highway Research, founded in the 1920s. It changed its name into the Highway Research Board from 1925 to 1974, and now we know it as the Transportation Research Board, which has an annual meeting in Washington, as you probably all know, now also including a standing committee on bicycle transportation. So let's see what it led us to. So let's take a look at the street. This is a typical Dutch intersection. People around the world come to look at it as a holy grail of sustainable safety. But let's look at it a bit closer. What is solidified here? What is the solidified language? Which choices are made? This was a place we used to talk about in terms of justice, but how do we talk about it now? So very quickly, you could say that the first traffic engineers, because it didn't exist, they had to come from elsewhere, right? And the first traffic engineer were actually water engineers, and they brought all kinds of metaphors and ways of thinking from their experience with water systems and sewage systems. This street as a system, a pipeline system, that can never be clogged. So that was the starting point. They started to borrow metaphors from elsewhere, because especially with metaphors, we can use to simplify complex reality, right? Think about it. All of us say things like, life is a journey, or love is a battlefield, or time is money. All those metaphors, if you think about it, five minutes, they're all not true, but they help us to simplify. So to simplify the street and the pipeline system, they first used metaphors from biology. Thinking about cities as human bodies with a heart and an artery system, again, something that can never be clogged, and something that will die off if you do not let it flow. They started to borrow from physics. Traffic engineering was using laws of physics. I think many people here that used models know the gravity model, right? The notion that we use a metaphor from how bodies in space interact as a metaphor to simplify a part of that reality, and again, showing mainly how As and Bs interact. Then we started to borrow from economics. Simplifying the human as a homo-economicus, an egoistic, rational, cold, calculating individual that is optimizing his or her own utility. And it's a very useful simplification to think about human behavior, especially as consumers. But it also makes us see certain things and makes us not see other things. In that model, a very important element became that mobility in itself is a derived demand. So it's a disutility. You want to be at A or at B, and everything in between is a negative. You want to minimize it as much as possible. And because of that, our politicians now think that the only thing that they have to spend money on is travel-time savings. That makes sense. We take for granted that we have simplified the human into a homo-economicus, and travel-time savings becomes the holy grail. In the Netherlands, we spend 8 billion a year on that, and every half an hour on all radio stations, you hear about congestion. There's no other problem that gets so much attention on our radios. So we moved from the primeval street where everything else had to go. We got zebra crossings. You can no longer cross everywhere you want. Our children got playgrounds. They could no longer play on the street. In the Netherlands, even the word street-play-day was abandoned, because it gave the wrong impression to children that they could actually play on the street. Because that's very dangerous. Why would you do that? Optimize the machine and marginalize the human. And this now solidified our imagination. The solidification is complete. Our imagination about the future of mobility is always about how to make it faster, easier, more comfortable, cheaper, and of course, sustainable, liveable, and safe. The technology will save us. This is the self-driving car. The self-driving car will now allow you to not experience the disutility of traveling, because now you can do... What are these people doing? I have no clue. I just read that more and more people are now using Zoom and Teams in their car on their way to the cubicle, I guess. The self-driving car makes travel time obsolete. You no longer experience disutility. The Hyperloop promises us incredible comfort and travel time savings, so we can now drink our coffee, not in Amsterdam, but we can go to Paris. Promising the technology will save us. And also, the bicycle. The bicycle is our mobility fix. Because thanks to all kinds of innovations, we can now all experience cycling also as a homo-economicist in a machine state. Look at this efficient machine. Mobility as a service. Mobility hubs. The commuter cyclist. Swapfeets. Fat bikes. Bicycle highways. Bicycle super highways. Super hyperbicycle super highways. Is this why John Lennon and Yoko Ono were in bed with a bicycle? Was this their song? Imagine cycling highways moving fast from A to B speed pedal-axe and e-bikes smart bikes and smart helmets to optimize the machine. Imagine cycling research teaching cyclists to behave be seen, be safe, don't be distracted remember to smile and wave don't upset car drivers so we can optimize the machine. Don't think so. I don't think so. I don't think so and it's also brought us to a place where I think John Lennon and Yoko Ono didn't want to go. Because just as the production forest our production streets trying to save travel time are not producing what we want. No wood production. Our production streets make us go faster and faster but we are not saving a single second of travel time. This is Dutch data that shows that after 60 years of investing 8 billion a year in travel time savings zero seconds of travel time were saved. Instead travel distances grew immensely. We went further and further to do the same activities. No travel time savings it doesn't exist. Travel distance loss. Cycling used in the same language that still is making traveling easier still being on the way is a disutility still our street is seen as an efficient pipeline and still the street is there for flow and throughput and nothing else. Instead of investing decades of 8 billion a year bringing us closer together it actually made us go further apart. We have to change that. You said it. You said that you wanted radical change in mobility and you said you wanted to play a role in that. If so we need to change our perspective and we can. That's the nice bit of this presentation. Because if we are not doing that if we are building the same factory on the same rationality the same foundation that created the system outside that is not sustainable that is not safe and that is not liveable we need to question the underlying rationality because if we are not doing that we are just building the same factory over and over again another great book by Robert Piessig Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and now the beauty is we can. You can. Let's listen to Lera Boroditsky a linguist professor to give us some hope. The beauty of linguistic diversity is that it reveals to us just how ingenious and how flexible the human mind is. Human minds have invented not one cognitive universe but 7,000. 7,000 languages spoken around the world. And we can create many more. Languages of course are living things. Things that we can hone and change to suit our needs. I've told you about how speakers of different languages think differently but of course that's not about how people elsewhere think. It's about how you think. It's how the language that you speak shapes the way that you think. And that gives you the opportunity to ask why do I think the way that I do? How could I think differently? And also what thoughts do I wish to create? Why do I think the way that I do? How can I change the way that I think? Which thoughts do you wish to create? That's powerful. And I think that is why John Lennon and Yoko Ono were in bed with a bicycle and I have to say there's a small secret here that John Lennon is a huge, huge, huge car enthusiast. So they arrived with a Rolls Royce and he had a huge collection of Aston Martins. So the bike was not so much John Lennon and I have to admit it was the counterculture, the provos, the gnomes. They brought the bike because the bike for them was a symbol. The feets is its and by no means. The bicycle is something and almost nothing. That was the statement of the 70s because it's 80% human at least compared to the car, which is 20% human and the rest technology. The bicycle offers a platform to understand diversity, to put the human central, to think about equity. So they used it against what they called brutal capitalism, against the machine, against technocracy, against a country where the car was representing the idea that everybody should be part of an efficient machine. They were fighting not only against things. They saw the bicycle as a symbol for the quality of living, for playing and growing and basically returning from the production street to the primeval street where cycling was a way to regain the quality of that primeval street. I call that conceptual leniency. The bicycle has a new language. So let's explore where that brings us. I bring two examples. This is a busy intersection in the middle of Amsterdam and from a traffic engineer perspective you could say that there are a lot of conflicts because if people are underway as rational utility maximizers all their interactions are conflicts because they want right of way. They have no way to negotiate. You want your rational right of utility. So what you would propose here is to get rid of the conflicts, to make a conflict-free intersection which is efficient, which would be with a traffic light. A traffic light system. In the Netherlands we have a beautiful word for that. A traffic light, stoplicht. A stoplicht and then a traffic engineer would say no, no, it's not a stoplight. It's a traffic light. A verkeerslicht. And then there's always another traffic engineer. You know what he would say? You know the Dutch word? VRI. Verkeersregelinstallatie. A traffic management system. That's what we need to solve the conflict. Optimize the machine. Okay, so let's now switch. Let's turn our perspective around. What would a sociologist see? A sociologist would see many different people of many walks of life that are meeting each other in public space. And potential exposure to diversity means that you're actively engaging with people outside of your bubble. We are in this bubble, but when we are outside cycling through Copenhagen, we meet other people. We see them. We engage with them. We interact with them, even if they dislike eye contact, as I understood in the Danish context. I understood by heart. I'm trying endlessly. So let's zoom in then. So again, you could say here we are looking at a very busy intersection behind Central Station in Amsterdam. And again, you can say that there are people solving conflicts. But we could also see that their potential exposure to diversity involves a very high amount of information sharing. It's a very complex thing that people are doing here. And if you look at their facial expressions, they are not very stressed. They're actually what they call inflow. People are dancing, and there's a choreography to the dance. They're exchanging information with all their senses, sending information, receiving it, and using it immediately to change their behavior. There's one tourist. She puts her foot down. So then you're out of the game. It's not only potential exposure to diversity. It's actually active negotiation all the time that you're doing. It's a game where you use all your senses. You use your full body to engage with others, with other people. So what does this potential exposure to diversity bring? This new different lens to think about our streets. But if you go into the literature, there's a huge list of potential effects, a higher sense of membership, a higher sense of influence, a higher sense of integration, the fulfillment of needs, shared emotional connections, a higher sense of being neighbors, collective efficacy goes up if people are more exposed to each other. Citizen participation goes up. Higher sense of community, higher sense of belonging, higher sense of place, but maybe the most important one, higher levels of trust. People that meet other people have more trust in each other and less prejudice. Man, think about that. Think about how we change now our mobility budgets, $8 billion a year in the not existing travel time savings, or $8 billion a year spending in things that matter for society. Minimize the machine. Let humanity thrive. Our language is not an objective mirror of reality. It is based on underlying worldviews, values and rationalities that we take for granted. But it profoundly shapes what we see, what we do not see. It shapes which data we collect, which we don't. It shapes what counts as evidence, what doesn't. If we want to support a truly radical cycling revolution, if we want to end the decade-long grand urban car experiment that so miserably failed us after such a monumental effort, we cannot take the rationality of efficiency, speed and growth for granted. We need to regain our conceptual leniency to start using cycling as a symbol for new rationalities and use such new rationalities to start building towards new urban mobility futures. But we are not victims. We are agents in this. Instead of using existing theories, existing concepts and existing models, and instead of trying to expand and improve on them, to also include cycling, we can also use here our collective intelligence and our collective time to work on truly radical alternatives. Alternatives that unlock the real true potential of cycling to regain the quality of our streets. We can come together to use cycling to train our collective cognitive leniency and this is why we created Cycling Research Board, a place that departs from the underlying taken for granted rationalities that were created by ourselves in the last decades and that created the unsustainable, unsafe and unlivable realities we now face. CRB is a place that is different in form, in content, in feeling and in ambition. It's great that we are now here celebrating already the fifth episode of what hopefully will also become a powerful force in reshaping our thoughts and realities in the decades to come. I want to express my sincere gratitude to the organization of making this happen. And there are many inspiring examples and we talked about a few of them already. Let me... So noisy that street, amazing. We know Carlos Moreno, we know Anídel Go, we know the story about the 15-minute city and the meaning that it brings to Parisians and we know that she won the elections. We've heard maybe about the city of Groningen and their new guideline for public space that makes the street not only a question of traffic engineers but also a question of ecology, a question of sociology and seven more dimensions. And we probably all know personal experiences, what happens if we are able to change our language. Because for radical change it is not enough to change the answers to the same questions. For radical change it's not even enough to change the questions. Instead we need to shift our attention to where our ideas of mobility in the street come from. The very rationality on which our thinking is built. We need to develop and practice our conceptual leniency by using cycling to look for radical alternatives. Maybe not seeing being underway as a negative utility, a negative quantity to be reduced but a positive quality, a positive quality to be increased. Maybe not seeing the street as a place to optimize the machine but maybe as a place to reduce the machine and let humanity thrive embracing friction and a bit of chaos and eye contact. And maybe not strengthen the home economics in us but also allow the homo-ludens, the playful human or the homo-father, the making human back on stage in all of us. This is our choice. And this is your choice. And as Lara Borodicki told us it is a choice about what thoughts you wish to create. Thank you.