 Hello everyone and welcome to episode 8 of Cycling Research Review. Today I'm here with my colleague Samuel Neela Denking from the University of Amsterdam and we're going to talk about his latest publication on the fare distribution of road space. So what inspired you to write this paper? Yes, so I was actually, I'm doing my PhD here at the University of Amsterdam and there's a kind of sideline of the PhD and one of the things I've been interested for a long time is how space is actually distributed between different transport modes and it's the kind of thing which we often see, you know, like on Twitter, GIFs, small things like this, you know of one cyclist or one car is, you know, the equivalent to six cyclists. Basically, you know, don't pedestrians and cyclists get a bad deal in terms of how space is distributed, which they do to be honest. So then I figured out using Amsterdam as a case study, so there's this high-scale sort of GIS map, so then you can actually map it all out and you find out that, well, like cyclists, they get around 7% of all space, so that's purely cycling tracks, then pedestrians, cars, both get around 40% and of course that's all very interesting, but then I was actually so once I done this, I started wondering, well, what do these numbers sort of actually tell us and how useful are they? In your paper, you talk quite a bit about how transport justice studies focuses on larger scale issues, such as on the level of the city or the level of a neighborhood. You, in this paper, now focus on the scale of the street. Can you tell us why that's important in your opinion? Well, I think potentially one of the reasons like transport planners, they've tended to focus on this very sort of urban wide scale is the connection between issues with accessibility, I think, and things like transport poverty and so these sort of big structural forces and the realm of the street, sort of at a small scale, it's tended to be something which we've tend to think, oh well, let's just leave that up to engineers or urban designers. But of course, ultimately, the big scale is lots of small things if you add it up. So I think now, but also from geographers, I think we're starting to see sort of a push to really focus on street level issues. You write on page 11 of your paper that ironically, arguments in favor of a fairer distribution of road space among different modes by sustainable transport advocates and unwittingly reproducing the traffic engineering mentality that they are seeking to criticize. Could you speak of it to why you think that's the case? Yeah, so I think this is kind of the big paradox which actually sort of motivated me to write it up as a paper. So this is precisely the kind of thing I was previously saying, you know, you'll see on Twitter, things like that, you know, one car is the equivalent of however many cyclists or however many pedestrians and all of this is, you know, it goes to point out how inefficient cars are. So of course, if you take that as a starting point, then you very quickly reach the sort of the conclusion that, well, then why shouldn't we actually just give cars less space and give pedestrians cyclists more space? So everyone kind of has a fair amount of space. But then the interesting thing is that if you take that logic up to its logical conclusion, well, it doesn't always come out in favor of pedestrians or cyclists. So in Amsterdam, for example, we can say cyclists, they've got seven percent of the space, but they're around one third of the trips. Right? So OK, so why not give them around one third of the space? But then the interesting thing is that if you take pedestrians, well, actually, pedestrians already have more space than they kind of deserve if we follow this same logic. So actually, you know, they have like around 40 percent of the space, but 40 percent of trips in Amsterdam are not made by pedestrians. Yeah, that you could also think of a of a city in which I mean many US cities, right? You might say 70 percent of the trips are made by private car. Does this mean cars should get 70 percent of the space? Well, probably not, right? So which brings us to the provocative argument that you make with looking at the size of the vehicles in the paper and how if you were to distribute road space by the size of the cars, then in many cities you would have this very ridiculously unbalanced equation that's actually not in favor of the car. Yeah, so I think I think the point here is that ultimately every transport mode, I mean, they they're fundamentally different. Not and of course, size is one big element, but it's not only about size. It's also, you know, cyclists, for example, they they weave in and out of traffic very easily. And that is I mean, that's the great thing about cycling, right? That you can potentially move more people in less space. So in this sense, you shouldn't you shouldn't think that for cyclists you need to treat them in the same way as cars, even though they physically have these characteristics. Exactly. And then for pedestrians, for example, a big part of just being up and about, it's not it's not about movement, right? You might sort of just hang around, stroll a bit. And of course, for all of these reasons, the pedestrian realm, in a way, it needs to be much more generously spaced than than the other realms. So in this sense, like, if you're thinking about cars, I mean, it's kind of it's kind of normal for cars to pile up, right, at a at a junction. But imagine imagine if pedestrians were given, like, so little space that they were literally piling up behind. Yeah, that wouldn't make no sense. If you think about it really, like, what's more underutilized? Sidewalks or or, you know, or the actual car lane. In many places, it's probably sidewalks, right? Objectively, I mean, like in terms of capacity, like you could fit more pedestrians in there. Yeah. But the whole point is that, like, it's OK for there not to be pedestrians there. It's kind of it's what's expected. I mean, they're just like qualitatively different. Comfort and come in as well. And comfort, spatial, like the aesthetics and and personal space and all these measures are not included in just the physical. Yeah, of course, of course. Could you tell us a little about the street behind us? Because you have two pictures in your paper. Yeah. So the transformation. So this is an interesting street. It's the Sarfatistrat in Amsterdam. And the now they call this Bicycle Street. And this is has been like this since about a couple of years ago. So basically, it's sort of red paint and that's kind of it. I mean, there's the tram in the middle, but that doesn't affect it. But and as you can see, the the main flow here is cyclists and they are meant to have priority. And then cars, they sort of they're allowed to use it. But as guests and in theory, which most of them do, they should yield to cyclists. But the so the interesting thing is that this used to be different cyclists actually used to have a separate cycling lane. And then and then there was a separate car lane in which also the speed used to be 50 kilometres per hour. Now it's down to 30. But of course, it's it's shared. So in a sense, you can consider it a shared space in which cyclists have priority, which is exactly what gave you such difficulty when you were trying to do these analysis. Right. Is these streets like this? Like, what do you classify it as, for example? Exactly. So in this sense, I think this is a nice example, which it kind of shows how this this logic of separating, you know, into car space, cycling space, kind of, well, it breaks down at a certain point. And and then we'll I think we also need to question. Well, you know, actually, in some cases, mixing might be more advantageous. So in the case of cyclism, I mean, there's actually been surveys which show that most people, they prefer the new situation, although in a way you could you could argue that they have less space. But of course, they also have more space in a different kind of way. So as an alternative, you actually propose looking at vehicle speeds in instead of looking at just the spatial room that vehicles take up. Could you suggest a few ways in which that could replace a current paradigm and how that could help the way we think about our cities? Yeah, in a way, it's not. I don't think it's sincerely about replacing it. I mean, so actually, looking at space and how it is distributed, it can be important, I'd say, and it can be useful. Just don't consider it as the sort of the sole measure of, you know, what is right and what is wrong. And in this sense, what what sort of what led me to put the focus in speed was, well, the wish to sort of give a bit of an alternative, right, as academics, like we have this tendency, I think, to just like criticise things and bring them down, sort of saying, oh, well, that's not right because you haven't looked at ABC. But then unless you sort of offer something else, well, how helpful are you being? Right. So so I do think that at least as a complement, it is interesting perhaps to shift somewhat the focus from the purely spatial element to really thinking about traffic speeds. And of course, there's there's there's been, you know, a big movement in sort of calm streets, you know, traffic calm zones, home zones. I mean, call them call them whatever you want. But the whole point is that the lower the traffic speeds are in general in a street or in a city, I think the more the quality is created between users, right? I mean, the minute someone's going at 70 per hour. I mean, they basically get to decide what's going on there. Yeah, they become dangerous. And also they effectively claim single ownership of the whole space. If everyone's kind of, you know, 15, 20 kilometers per hour. Well, on the one hand, that still it allows for more flexibility. So you probably need to, you know, regulate less in a formal manner. I mean, of course, there's the whole safety dimension, which is important. But I'd say it's only it's only part of the picture. But then, yeah, it just I just think allows for coexistence, you know, you know, which I mean, it is in the end, it is the basic shared space argument, which I think has been has been raised often. But then what I think would be interesting and what I kind of suggested in the paper is really sort of following the same logic of the, you know, oh, let's measure space distribution in the whole city. I mean, why don't you do that for speeds? So, you know, really, GIS play around, measured street speeds in every you could do a nice little histogram and you could you could really start hopefully seeing interesting things. Nice. Yeah. And Sam, where can they find you on the internet? Oh, well, I think I am probably much less internet savvy than than you are. But I do have my my Twitter, which exists and, you know, things, things do happen there. I believe that I am called Nello Deacon there. Yeah. And other than that, my University of Amsterdam home page, I think is the best place for it. Nice. Thanks for joining us today for the interview. My pleasure. And if you want to see more of Sam's work, I will link to the open access paper in the links below. And to find out more about him, I will also link him to his Twitter. So do follow him if you like his work and we will see you next week. And thanks for joining us. Take care.