 This brief presentation will be titled The Three Mist of Cycling Debunked, which is something that I try and talk to the general audience about. I am George Liu, the Executive Director of the Urban Cycling Institute at the University of Amsterdam. What I do is I work in my PhD in this field and I'm also putting out during this COVID time quite a few online courses, and there's a YouTube channel. We tweet a lot. We're quite active on social media. Our mission is all about bringing the science of cycling from research to practice and back. If you're ready for the Three Mist of Cycling Debunked, I'm going to go ahead in this presentation. It's a Dutch-centric view, but hopefully this will also apply in your individual context. First we start out with something quite common, ordinary that has somehow become a very, very commonplace image in our society. It's a hundred years ago, right? We have the first automobile was invented, and here we are a hundred years later. We have scenes like this, scenes of huge amounts of money, investment, and energy being poured into human mobility. This is one example of the mobility just on the surface, but you can also imagine the different ways that this picture and this idea can then be applied to all aspects such as aviation, marine mobility, and so forth. This is really one of the biggest challenges in our time, is how to move from A to B in a way that's friendly to our economy, to our standard of living. This one always cracks me up, and it's the black hole of urban transportation. This is the black hole theory of highway investment, which does let us to question what is the logic that we're using with our government money. This is highway investment is done mostly by public funds, and I liken it to the military industrial complex in a way, where especially back in the Cold War in the U.S., a lot of investment in weapons was fed by the private sector, but through very big government contracts. If we think about the relationship between the automobile industry and the government, it's kind of the same type of relationship. The government provides roads on which you drive your cars, so it's providing a platform on which we can at the same time then connect both the private and public sectors. Arguably this is not the most efficient way to do it, and arguably the spiral demonstrates the falsity of this logic. More highway congestion, as you've seen in the picture, leads governments to react by adding more capacity. We know from research that this capacity is quickly taken up by even more traffic on the roads. There is near infinite demand for trips because the price of using the roads is zero. I'm talking to a group of executives here. When you have the price of zero, basically there's nothing to control the demand, and the supply curve is straight up and down. If you think about road space with a price of zero from the user perspective, you have a really difficult economics problems here. This is partially why I became interested in the idea of road space pricing because traffic congestion doesn't have to be an unsolved problem in this world with electronic tolling, etc. We have solutions that can really affect the way that we use our road space and solve this problem of having road space costs have a marginal cost of zero, which is not really the society's cost. What happens if we keep investing in the spiral? What happens here is we fall into this black hole, but what happens when we reverse the spiral? This is what my presentation will talk to you today, is that reversing the spiral requires a completely different logic than what got us into here. This is the alternative. This is an alternative where mobility and place making happens in the same spot. This is an alternative where if we choose to build cities that cater to pedestrians and people on bikes, then we can create spaces that are much more activated than the highways that we see being built today. Arguably it's more economically vibrant, plus we provide a place making function where we don't drive away people from our cities, but instead complement the people who are there. The three myths that I will go through today. Number one, I'm studying bicycle infrastructure, so build it and they will come. There's the argument going around in cities, especially during the times of COVID where we see cities building quite an extensive network of bicycle infrastructure, right? That cycling replaces driving. Is this true? Can cycling alone be the solution to the black hole of traffic investments? And the idea that if cities write a plan and follow it, that this is in itself sufficient to bring about cycling in the urban environment. So let's tackle the first myth. Build it and they will come, right? And this is where my experience as an urban planner comes in, right? And it's this idea of combining the physical and spatial with the behavioral and social that building bicycle infrastructure is perhaps not enough, but if we combine it with how people move about, that we can come to a solution. So this is an interesting map of the city of Amsterdam. And in the center, you see the city center, which is on the left on these green bars. The light green is mode-shared by car. The middle green is percent of trips by bicycle, and then the dark green is percent of trips by public transport. And what is clear from this picture is that we like to think about Amsterdam and the Netherlands as the cycling capital together with Copenhagen of the world, right? But within this picture, you can also see that indeed when it comes to cycling, even within the same city, you can see there's much more bicycle mobility in the city center. And that the way that we move is highly dependent on the urban form that we have created, right? And this urban form is highly dependent on how governments choose to plan their cities. So it's likely that in your own city that you will also have different segments where in the city center, you see a very different way of people moving about rather than compared to the outskirts, that in the city center of any city, there's more people walking about compared to, in general, more driving out in the suburbs. Perhaps that is a nature of the city that we're building, but perhaps there's something that we can also do to deliberately affect change. So to illustrate this point further, you can see that if you have bicycle infrastructure in your city, you can see that this is, in fact, what looks like a perfect piece of bicycle infrastructure. You have a separated bike path on the side and a roadway in the middle. In any context, this would be quite excellent. But we're looking at, this would be one of the bicycle networks out in the suburbs. But it's not necessarily what the separation and the explicit accentuation of cycling and walking that is necessarily the thing that will get people to come. In fact, if you look at this streetscape, there is no bicycle infrastructure at all. But in fact, this environment is much more attractive to a higher number of people who choose to go by bike and number of people who choose to walk. So this kind of represents a conundrum and two different approaches to city planning. And the way we can design our streets is represented by, do we have to separate everything, which is very much the modernist approach, right? So we provide each mode with their own way of getting about. Or do we kind of embrace the chaos of what is fundamentally so advantageous of city center environments that we try and mix modes as much as possible while using traffic calming for cars and leveraging the economic activity and the frequency of social interactions on the street to then further increase the economic value of what is on the street. Because as you can see here, this is a very lively use of public space. And in fact, here the restaurants are benefiting from the environment. And I would argue that the people sitting outside in the patio are benefiting from people watching on the streets that are passing by. So something to think about. And if you're a transport planner, you probably already know about this model. But for those who are interested, it's how we look at the transport system and how the way that we move relates to the way that our cities are built, right? And that our transport system is intimately connected with the activities that we do and the accessibility of where we need to go. So for example, if the closest place to get groceries is five kilometers away from your house, then in a way your activities are forced to be further apart. And if your activities are forced to be further apart, then naturally that will also lead to you having to travel more. And of the minimum you can get away from traveling is a large distance and naturally you are going to choose to drive a car, right? So I'm trying to illustrate the connection between how our cities are built, how far we are from our destinations, with the idea that we get to choose how we move. And the further away things are, the more likely we are to favor driving, which then we get back into the black hole of traffic highway investment. So that was the first myth. Build it and they will come, right? So it's not necessarily true that we have to build separated bicycle infrastructure to get people cycling, but here's the caveats, right? Connected, meaningful, daily destinations in a real bus network, and through over time we will attract more people who cycle and walk. And this is interesting and perhaps in the last 10 months or so has been really accelerated by this COVID pandemic. And it appears that the cities who are building bicycle infrastructure are seeing a huge increase in recreational use, right? So that we're seeing a use of not just people riding to the store, but also people traveling because, well, they got to get out of the house. And that's one of the important considerations for these leisure modes as well. Cycling replaces driving. So if there is the black hole of road space investment, would we think about if using the bicycle can indeed replace the automobile? And indeed, if you look at your city, it's likely that it's probably very automobile and public transport dominated. So how do we insert if we want a cycling into that system? So this is an image of a train station in the Netherlands. And you can see what's powerful here is that there's a lot of bikes parked outside. And it's not in the Netherlands, it's like a marriage of convenience. But if you really think about how the system evolved, it's quite a powerful way to leverage the train system as or the public transport system, such as a BRT, to get from A to B over longer distances. This might be interesting. This is a chart of the different stations in the Netherlands. This is probably applicable to in general any type of train network, especially I think in Switzerland, it's a very big train network, also very dense. And what this figure shows is that the catchment area of pedestrian, how many people live within one kilometer of all train stations? And then how many people live within 75 kilometers of all train stations? 7.5 kilometers. And this just makes the argument that 81% of all people in the Netherlands live within 7.5 kilometers of a train station. And the argument here is that if you can get to a train station quickly, then that train network, if you have a robust train or bus rapid transit network, can then transport you at a much faster rate to anywhere else that you need to go. But the challenge is really getting to a station. And as we know, most public transport systems are set up in a way that get you from nowhere to no place, right? And basically, we can use cycling as a way to solve the front door to a train station problem. And if you think that 80% of everyone lives within 7.5 kilometers of a train station, right? Then you start to think about what impact that micro mobility and e-bikes could have on the system. That in fact, you don't have to ride 30, 40 kilometers on an e-bike. But in fact, if you can make it easier for people to get to a portal for getting onto transit in a reliable and time effective way, that if you can time your commute so that you arrive at the train station within 30 seconds of when the door closes, then you can really offer a novel way to move away from automobile transport. And for places like Switzerland and perhaps Germany, this could be a very powerful way to think about replacing car travel. So this is your conventional bike pedestrian range. And then on the right, it's an idea that you have much more choice if you are able to electrify these access modes. That if you're able to move faster through your environment, it's actually the area that you're able to cover. It's something like, what's the math? Like a circle is the pi r squared of the radius. So if you're able to move more quickly, you actually access more destinations at a squared function. So it's not linear, but it is a squared function. This is the same idea as the chart that I showed you earlier, but in a map form. And this is the Dutch train network. It's very well served. So what's the caveat here? Cycling replaces driving? No, cycling plus a dense and high service train network can possibly replace driving. Because there are people who commute 30, 40, 100 kilometers to get to work. And for that segment of the population where you don't live within cycling distance, that we should think about having cycling and public transit as a complement to a healthy urban transportation system. Let's get to the third one. Write a plan and follow it. So this is perhaps aimed at the city administrators on this call. And I think the Dutch really loved to plan. And you can see it's historically based on the because they've always had a fight with the water. And damming the water and making sure the water is well managed has been a history of the Dutch. And therefore, urban planning has become a large history of the Dutch. But with that urban planning also comes why it's masked plans for these cities and power to execute these plans. So when we had urban renewal around the world in the 1970s, which was another way to, say, build highways through less desirable neighborhoods, the same thing has happened in the Netherlands as well. So there was a time when their plans to raise quite a few cities, not just in the Netherlands, but around Europe. And it was fashionable at the time to build highways. And even at the expense of mowing down whatever buildings are in its way. And this is one of the examples of a neighborhood in Amsterdam undergoing the same transformation here. So we're going to connect to another issue, perhaps, of urban mobility is that the adverse impact that auto mobility has had on public health in terms of not just obesity and lack of exercise, but also of traffic deaths. And this is, in general, the number of traffic deaths in the Netherlands. And you can see it really peaked in 1972 with 3,500. And it has gone down ever since. So the first increase here before the 1970s was really doing a large part to the growth of automobiles. So a lot of people were buying cars and driving them on the roads. But then what's interesting is that globally, traffic deaths has really started to fall and follow the same pattern. The same pattern then leads us to question, well, what happened here? Partially because of good road design and better road design. But the number of vehicle miles didn't decrease after the 1970s. So it was actually another causal factor. And in the 1970s, we had the oil crisis, which impacted all around the world. And the Dutch, during that time, taken the advantage to really rethink their traffic policy. If you look at a street in 1981 on the left and you look at a modern Dutch street in 2016, you can clearly see the differences that has happened. So the number of vehicle kilometers traveled hasn't really gone down between these two eras. In fact, it's probably much higher in 2016. But the way that we've managed traffic within cities, especially, has really changed in the meantime. Again, here, 1973, and a similar transformation happened on the street as well. So basically, the general mood of keeping automobiles away from the city center and more towards peripheries has had a positive impact on urban life in the city centers. But that also brings up the question of just because we've removed the problem from the city centers, do we have a new set of problem in the periphery that by making the urban center more walk-friendly, do we then give an incentive to the people who like to drive to move further out? And of course, that is a very valid question. And perhaps we don't have clear data to follow people and where they go in terms of their preferences. But overall, I think we also want to look at design from a human perspective, which is what I'm doing with my PhD is looking at this idea of experience and using people's behavior as a blueprint to see how we can change intersections and how we can design cities differently. So here is a route map that traces cyclists as they go past an intersection in Amsterdam. And I want you to notice this is very interesting. They don't follow the way that they're supposed to go, right? Like if you're making a left turn, you should technically, in this design, go all the way across and then wait for a green and then go left. But you see people ducking this design all the time and they just cut right through. Similarly, the pink. And similarly, you also have the same problem in the green. So how do we design to accommodate people's behavior rather than trying to wrangle people's behavior to the intersection and the mechanical environment? And perhaps one of the solutions is to change the primary focus of design, going from a design that forces people to conform to the logic of an intersection to an intersection that then is molded around the desires of the people using it. And you can see here are some quite subtle changes. These are some old traffic islands here. This was the old island and then the old island here. And then this was much bigger here. So they managed to remap this and do away completely. Because people who are going left were actually trying to go left directly. So why not just take away this traffic island here, rearrange the signal cycle, and make it easier for people to make a direct left. After all, the people who ride bikes through this intersection are many times more than the drivers who are going through this by car. So if that's the case, then the primary design vehicle really should be the users who are using this the most. And this is kind of one of the results that we got. So similarly, you have a lot of people crowding here, especially with COVID, with social distancing. You really don't want people bunching up at intersections. And what can you do? You can just cut out this whole concrete island. It doesn't really need to be there. But it's something that was there because of habit and tradition. We kind of figured out how to win some more space by looking at our designs critically. So write a plan and follow it. Maybe not. Maybe writing a plan is more of an iterative process to help us to listen and watch people, to experiment, to follow what people want from their city, think about the uses of the street critically, and then as an iterative cycle to rewrite the plan. And as we come back to the image of the neighborhood that was raised in the 1970s, I thought it would be good to reflect on that with massive power by the planning authorities in government. There's also massive power to do away with entire chunks of neighborhood. But as part of an iterative process, it seems like with citizen pushback especially, that many of these projects were able to be stopped completely. And for that one neighborhood, it was too late. But if you were to go back to the plans, perhaps even the plans in your city, you may think that most of the highways have been implemented in its entirety. But if you go back to the plans in your city, you'll be very surprised to learn that probably a majority of the large infrastructure projects that were planned and were popular back in the 1970s were probably stopped by the turn of the 1980s and the 90s. I know this is definitely true for Dutch cities, for a lot of American cities. But it's this idea of always consulting citizens and this idea that our mood and the way that we view cities and public space and the role of government is a constantly evolving process. So yes, planners do plan and we do have a long-term vision based on the era that you're in. But one of the roles of government and the people really is to think about how these plans can be iterated and be aware of what comes in the future, that we don't project what our vision is now, 15 years in the future and fail to revisit these plans. So some key lessons here and I want to end off with this. So it seems like infrastructure works, but combined carefully with consideration of the urban fabric. So we saw that the way that infrastructure can be built in a very car-friendly environment that accommodate bikes, but what people really want for a vibrant neighborhood is actually liveniness and it's not necessarily provided in a context by putting infrastructure next to a highway. That there's huge potential for cycling and transit. So if you're thinking like a company like Bombardier, how do you sell transit to municipal governments? They're tight on budget. And perhaps one of the ways to sell transit in a city where no one wants to take transit is to illustrate the symbiosis. That if you're able to replace some of the car drivers to people who walk or ride bikes, then naturally you will develop a market for your transit system. And thinking about the symbiosis together with how you build cities around transit development is perhaps a good way to think about how we can propel cities into the future. And then as we move into this 21st century of urban planning, it has become much more fashionable to do this plan experiment, observe type of consultation and planning that's much more on a short cycle, that much more involves people. But there's also something insidious about this short term process, that as we move on to an era of big data, that governments are really responding to these models and data collected from people and that we have to be careful who possesses these data, who's in control of this, whose interests these are in, and definitely be sure that these do reflect the will of the people that we're designing for. So here's a bunch of links to our social media and Coursera offerings. Thanks for the content from our team who provided many of the images from the slide. And a couple of things before I open up for Q&A, there's the Unraveling the Cycling City course from the University of Amsterdam. So it's free with a paid certificate if you're so interested. We're almost up to 10,000 people enrolled in that course. So it'd be great if you want to contribute and help us to get there. And then for the people who want to get into the profession of designing bicycle infrastructures, that we have just funded by the EU. So this is now free, Designing the Cycling City, which is at designthecyclingcity.com. And I believe my past self has spoken much more eloquently than my present self in these courses. But I'm really here for the Q&A and I hope this has stimulated some thought and I want to open up the floor to you guys.