 Hello everyone and welcome back to episode 10 of Cycling Research Review. Today's paper is by the author of Ben Hamilton Bailey titled Urban Design. Why don't we do it on the road? Modifying traffic behavior through legible urban design. So this paper really tries to take us to the urban design realm and is written for traffic engineers and it teaches traffic engineers some ideas that might help them reconceptualize A. what road space is for and B. how the urban design world can give lessons to the world of traffic engineering. He starts off by painting a picture and is a picture of stepping off the train in Bath. He says quote step off the bus or the train on arrival to any town or city. The backdrop to your first impression will be determined by the history, the landscape and topography and architecture of the place. Buildings and their interrelationships will be inspiring or depressing depending on the creative efforts of man and nature. We know we are in Bath, Baltimore or Berlin by a unique complex mixture of natural and artificial landmarks and symbols that provide the data for our mental maps and our memories. Yet the foreground to our experience of cities is very different. It is likely to have been fashioned neither by natural processes nor by the peculiarities and idiosyncrasies of architecture or the design professions. The immediate close-up environment of almost all of our cities is determined by curbs, asphalt, road markings, bullets, traffic signals, barriers and signs. We will negotiate our journey into and through the city amidst the landscape fashioned by traffic engineering. The rules that govern this landscape have little in common with the special culture, history and values of shape, architecture and the unique signature of place. So this quote brings up how urban design has a relationship to a both our psychology of how we perceive a place and also to the landscape on the environment. So whereas urban design, he argues, works with the environment to create something unique, traffic engineering is more about creating uniformity so that people who are driving at higher speeds don't have to exert too much mental energy in order to negotiate a place. Think about a highway near you. It is a place that's almost completely carved through nature in an effort to make sure that the traffic that goes through doesn't have to make tight turns or drivers are free from making any immediate decisions that that might be dangerous. So big signs, big lane marking, everything's very clear. But the expense of this is we lose the sense of unique notice to a place. And the other expense of this is that we have cities full of signs, markings and these uniform infrastructure that perhaps detract from what he calls the background of a city. So imagine yourself coming out of a train station and you're suddenly greeted by a five-lane road instead of having the vista and the view for you to immediately see the city. You know, we have come to accept this as the price of efficiency, modernism, whatever you call it. But this paper makes an argument that at least within urban areas and within our cities that the ideals of placemaking, that having a place's unique signature isn't much more important than getting traffic to move through. So he notes from the urban design point of view that there's very little traffic engineering that's actually taught in that school. So anything related to traffic, it's completely ignored. But it's peculiar because as he mentioned in places like Detroit, New York, traffic actually takes up most of the urban space. So there's much more road than there are sidewalk. And the sidewalk is a domain of urban designers whereas the road is a domain of traffic engineers. He notes, the Wellstock Library of Harvard's Graduate School of Design, one the leading in the world, for example, contain little reference to traffic engineering. And there appears to be no comprehensive history of the subject. The distance between traffic engineering and urban design seems to be reflected in universities everywhere. And the disciplines appear to have entirely disconnected sources and starting points. So it's really odd that something that's so close physically in our environment, if you're on one side of the curb, it's urban design. If you're on the other side of the curb, it's traffic. Something that really is really demarcated by something as simple as a curb have very few intellectual roots together. We expect people to work together to build a city. But because these disciplines are so far apart, they don't have a shared language. They don't have shared models of how things work. For example, traffic engineering is heavy in mathematics. Urban design is more heavy on the creative side, so much more in common with architecture. And if they don't have the same language, you throw these professions together in a municipal government office or an urban planning department, you expect these people to work together. So perhaps there's room in there on the education side to bring these disciplines close together. Furthermore, it is important to think about where cycling fits into this. Is it more, which side of the curb is it on if we continue this metaphor? Is it on the sidewalk side? Is it on the traffic roadside? And I think depending on that, then that's also a place to start this conversation. It could really be a place where we bring urban designers and traffic engineers together and say, hey, your models about how the world works is not sufficient. That, in fact, for some types of vehicles in some environments, we require both sets of expertise. And I see it as an opportunity to bring these realms together. So he goes on to comment on how this idea of separation, traffic separation, and traffic integration has evolved over time and where it came from. One of the sources is Buchanan's Traffic in Towns Report written for the British government about some ideas to move forward in the 1963. This is when traffic became a real issue in Great Britain and that's when they realized that traffic was clogging up cities. And I quote, what guiding planners and traffic engineers to segregate roads designed for the movement of vehicles from spaces where pedestrian activities, children's play, and public events would take place. The pedestrian precinct was born where the architecture and urban form of a city could be isolated from traffic movements. And he goes on to contrast this to how in modern Dutch concepts, for example, the von Neff, where the traffic is calmed down to make room for children playing, to make room for social activities on the same street where cars are. And here we see, well, what is a street? If we take out the curb, which is what he's suggesting, if we take out the curb and create a shared space, who controls this domain? What kind of logic should it follow? And do we need signs at all to make it work? So he illustrates in this diagram the difference between traffic space and the social space, which he demarcates on the traffic zone as single, uniform, regulated, impersonal, predictable. And on the social side, multifunctional, diverse, culturally defined, personal, and unpredictable. My question to you is, where does cycling space fit in? Is it a social zone activity or is it a traffic zone activity? He states, the contrast between the characteristics of these two worlds are striking. The traffic zone, such as a freeway, serves a single purpose. It is highly regulated by the state through rules, regulations, examination, and legal enforcement. It is subject to systems analysis and, in theory, predictable. It is impersonal and uniform. By contrast, the qualities that we most associate with the rich and varied public realm are exactly the opposite. Cities accommodate a multitude of simultaneous functions. They are highly diverse, personal, and are governed by a complex web of ever-evolving social and cultural conventions. Cities are unpredictable and rich urban environments offer surprise, serendipity, and ambiguity. What do you want in a cycling journey? Which side do you want it to fall on? He goes on to then highlight the elements of human physiology and psychology that comes into play when we're designing social spaces. He notes that at speeds we're designed to run at a maximum speed. I mean, unless you're going super fast and you're a world champion, our bodies are designed to protect us at our maximum running speed. And he says anything below 30 kilometers an hour, if we hit something, we can usually survive. Anything above that, we're evolutionally not designed to do so. Which brings up the interesting point on a bicycle unless you're racing down the hill or you're on one of those really fast e-bikes, it's likely that you'll be able to survive at normal urban traffic speeds. In terms of another physiological attribute, it's our ability to make eye contact, to able to see movement and to predict movement and predict interactions with other people. We can very easily do this on the sidewalk, we sidestep left or right according to what other people are doing as they come towards us. The busy sidewalks of New York are an excellent example of us. But as you ramp up the speed, we lose our ability to negotiate. And at what speed do we lose this ability? It's not clear, but it seems to me that people cycling and seen in a busy place like Amsterdam, they can self-manage quite well without traffic lights. So there's something about the speed at which we move under which we don't need regulations because we can self-regulate and interact with each other to make traffic movements happen. So this kind of brings us back to a very philosophical point and we covered this in Koglen and Rise paper about how modernism and traffic engineering went together. And Hamilton Bailey asked, how do we choose to balance the freedom of an individual to travel fast? And the wellbeing of other groups such as children, the elderly, it says a great deal about our values and the sorts of towns and cities that we desire. I'll ask you what types of city do you desire? Which environment could we use more of? And how can the cycling contribute to this environment? What aspects of traffic, of regulated uniform space does cycling require? And to what extent does it make a cycling journey better to have a more unpredictable serendipitous journey? And in relating to my own research, what does it mean for bicycle highways? And what kind of infrastructure are we creating if we're given the chance to create dedicated bicycle infrastructure? So these are my questions to you and it's been a while but I'm back. So hello everyone and I'm glad we finally got to episode 10 after a long summer break. In the next episode, I'll talk about the future of this channel and how we plan to proceed forward, especially at the Urban Cycling Institute. So stay tuned.