 Hello and welcome to this talk. My name is Dr. George Liu and it's very good to be here in Zandam today. I was a resident of Zandam. I lived right by the fairies. My area of research is mobility. Now part of my research was on the bike train journey. So figuring out I came here to study cycling but I also fell in love with the train system, right? Because it's also I know you all like to hate on NS whenever it's late. But in the global context it is rather a remarkable system with just a few exceptions but we all love to complain about the exceptions, right? So first some fundamentals. You can recognize this. This is right behind the Amstel station in Amsterdam but normally if you visit elsewhere in the world there might be a few bike parking spaces in Canada where I grew up, you know what surrounds the train station is a giant parking lot, right? Because everyone drives so you drive to the train station as well. So this forms a remarkable addition to the system, a feeder system that gets people on their bike from door to door, right? Via the train system, right? And that's what makes it possible to live without a car. So I enjoy showing this graphic, right? It's about the Netherlands and the Rijnstad in context. So this puts the Rijnstad in context and I would argue the Rijnstad is part of the Rijnstad and therefore you're part of the dense train system. So if you were to focus actually on the Rijnstad itself, it's actually quite compact, right? And you can see that if you were to look at the densest part of the Netherlands then it is actually quite a smaller area than even Los Angeles or New York. And you have an excellent train system to complement that area. Not to say and also an excellent cycling network, right? So this is what you have. So each line, as you know, would have two hour service, so half an hour daily train service. So if you were to look at the combined frequencies, it's actually better than some metro systems. For example, I came from Rotterdam today and off peak hours, the Rotterdam metro in the evening, some of the lines only run every 20 minutes, right? Whereas here you pretty much get every 15 minutes, every 10 minutes during the peak hour, right? So it's a remarkable system. It's a train network that offers a metro like frequency. And that's the key to making the bike train system works, right? And you can see here clearly, so this is the four big cities and we are up here somewhere, right? And we can see the hotspots where many trains depart. So who came to the Zandam main station? Anyone did that? Yes. What was the reason for that? Other than maybe you work to go to the office, not here, yeah. So I came directly here and I had the choice of two stations, right? They had the intercity and the sprinters all the way up to then Helder, that was a branch. And then the other branch had less trains going, but it was a closer walk, right? Or I could have went to Zandam and took an Obeyfeats and I would have gotten here in the same amount of time, right? So it's about providing these options. So you're all very familiar with how bikes work and how trains work. But as part of a system, this is kind of the concept. So you're your home and you're trying to get to work. But your train station isn't outside your door. It's generally a bit of a walk away and you have some options here, right? So you want to get from here to here in the fastest way, because you know this is the quickest connection and basically the options. What's interesting is between these two branches, right? Do you take the metro? Do you take the bus? Do you walk or do you take the bike or in extreme cases in a small town? Maybe there's a parking lot where you drive to a sprinter station. And this is a remarkable system because the trains run on a schedule, right? Every ten minutes, every 30 minutes. If you miss a train, the next one doesn't come until the next one comes. If you fail to get on your bike, your bike is still there waiting for you, right? So that's what I mean when I talk about flexibility. This might not come as a surprise, but 47% of all trips going to the train station is by bike, right? And we have less going to the work side. Your office is actually quite close to the train station, so many development principles there try and put workspaces. You see this in Utec station, you see it here. Workstaces close to the train station, because that generates a lot more trips. Ideally, you just make one leg of the trip by bike, and then the other end, you can walk. But if you can't walk, that's where the Ove Feet system comes in, or for those occasional trips. So, most people have a bike at home, I hear more than one per person, take it to the train station, no problem, but this part presents more of a problem. So this is the interesting problem, but we have an interesting solution. And here is kind of how we can conceptualize. The nearest train station to here today is within walking distance, right? If I were to go to Zandam, which has more frequency, more intercity services, maybe I'm going to the 3.5 kilometer range by bike. And then by e-bike, now you can't even go further, right? So we're looking at 15 minute radiuses, and if you were to go to a train station even further than that, not willing to cycle, then you have other options available to you. So this is within a chart form, more academic for you, okay? So we have a few lines, we have walking and bike and car. So basically, why would you choose to walk instead of taking your bike on the home side if you have a bike available to you? So we combine all of this, and we see that at some point, right, you make some choices here. So you can choose to walk to the train station. If you have a car, you can choose to drive or take car share. And then as researchers, we can look at all of this data at these crossing points, right? Where we have distance versus travel time, and we can think in terms of optimization, right? If you're thinking, okay, I want the shortest amount of time, which mode do I take? This is kind of the math that goes into your head. So if you're looking at walking to the train station, for example, you would take a walking line, and then you would intercept this theoretical train, and you would get on the train and go, right? If you're taking a bike, it takes you less time to get to the train, then you would intercept it at a lower time before you start your journey. So what I'm trying to illustrate is it takes more time to unlock your car, get in the car than it takes to ride a bike. And then if you have, right, if you walk, there is zero time to get out your door, that you don't have to unlock anything, and you just go straight. So you start your journey, but your journey is much slower. So what I'm trying to show here is that if you walk and take the train, then the time it takes to get your train part of the journey started could be 20 minutes or 25 minutes, right? The same journey, if you chose to, or three. Yeah, so theoretically, same distance. This is just trying to show that if you were to take a bike, you decrease that, but the train part of the journey is very quick, right? So we're focusing on the door to train station journey. And then in terms of costs, right, when it comes to the municipality, when it comes to NS, when it comes to the government, how do you spend on infrastructure, right? So this is where we have the last mile problem, that it's much cheaper to move a large amount of people from point A to point B in terms of public transport than it is to have, like, 30 different bus lines that come every half an hour. And no one is happy with those 30 different bus lines, right? So by combining cycling and the train, we're able to concentrate more of the ridership between two big stations. And then that means that we don't have to worry as much or provide less service to areas that don't have access to a bus, or a stop right outside their door, right? So it's an optimization problem, of course, you may choose to provide more bus service as well, but at least with a cycling network, it gives you that opportunity to make these travel investment decisions. So this is going to be a bit of an exercise for you. I'm going to ask you to pull out your phone. Has anyone heard about isochrones? So isolated time over geography. So think of this as if you went to Amsterdam Central Station and you plotted the different places you can get to by train and you figured out what is the boundary of 30 minutes by public transit, right? And then you plot it on the map and all the red areas show you 30 minutes by public transit. Now we're going to try with this app, hopefully it works better on the computer, but you can also try it on your phone. The layers might not work well, but you can get one. So basically the exercise now for you is from where you live, right? I would like you to figure out what your travel boundaries are. And we can start with cycling as a mode. Cycling, you have your map, right? Okay, what do you have? You were to describe the shape, what shape do you have? Round, right? You might have a circle, might be jaggedy, there might be a river. And that's the general shape, it makes sense because when you're cycling, there's no stations to get to, right? Walking is about the same, but smaller, makes sense, because you're walking slower than cycling. And then driving, maybe a bit longer along the highways. And then what's interesting about this app, you can play with it later, is that it also adjusts the area dynamically. So if you pick rush hour, your driving circle gets quite a bit slower. That's one of the things that's really cool that we can do as researchers, interacting with GIS, geographical information systems, and maps. And we can find detailed information like this. So this'll be my final point then, on this exercise, is in 2015, 2013, a few geographers got together and came up with this theory of urban fabrics, right? And this theory of urban fabrics outlines, you have your walking fabric in the middle. So imagine you're starting in the city center, right? So you have two kilometers walking within 15 minutes. You have your transit fabric, which you see, you might recognize the dots. This is a historical story, right? This map is a historical map. And then later, when the automobile came around, what happened? Right, so then you get access to all this in between, right? This is now all open for development. And remarkably, this is also the story of many Dutch cities. So what you get in the Rijnstad is actually something quite similar to this diagram, and when it comes to planning this community, right? I think there's a lot of ways to take advantage of this type of urban development thinking, right? You have three train stations available to you within biking distance, but you also have competition, and the competition is also the two highways that are surrounding this neighborhood, right? So there's a choice to be made. And when you move in as a new resident and you're thinking, how do I get to work, right? Because it's easier to convince new residents to make a travel choice. It's easier to convince them before they buy the car to take the train. Once they buy the car, the economics of it all changes, right? So to these new residents, how do you convince them to make their decisions in a way that favors a cycling and train system? And how do you convince them to stay away from the highway system, which is a much more expensive resource, right? And I hope through this exercise you've seen some different ways that people can make their decisions. There's gotten you to think about practically here how people can move to these three train stations, a minor station, a slightly bigger station with inter-cities and sprinters, and then a much larger station in Zandam, which has many more trains, but you have to bike a bit further to get there, right? And what's missing from this conceptual diagram and from your maps is the power of cycling, because once you have these tiny circles that become much larger circles, you can capture many more people into the train system and make it a much more attractive option. And how do we make campaigns and actions and deliberate choices to highlight this possibility? But then you take e-bikes and the possibilities become even larger, right? So if you can ride even faster to the train station, where does that unlock? For this area, maybe not much, but say if you're living five, six kilometers out, maybe that's what it takes as an e-bike to help you shift to this other mode of community.