Biking as Sustainable Transport: Study in Denmark and the Netherlands

Arriving in our final city of the trip, Amsterdam, members of the group participated in the PUMA Game developed by Dr. Meredith Glaser of the Urban Cycling Institute housed in the University of Amsterdam. PUMA stands for Planning, Urban Design, Mobility, and Accessibility. The task challenged us to explore three areas of the city: the Post-War suburbs, the Pre-War region, and the city center (the war reference is for the period after World War II). We needed to identify and document a series of examples of how the spatial and social fabric of the city influenced these four elements of Amsterdam's transportation system. Riding the M53 Red Line from Weesperplein station to the southern terminus and suburb of Gaasperplas A station map of the M53 Red Line What I enjoyed about this activity is how I could compare different areas of Amsterdam that developed during different time periods in the last century as well as provide a comparison to the land use patterns employed in the United St...

In an earlier post, I mentioned how in designing a complete sustainable transportation system, we must design to integrate various modes of sustainable transport rather than focusing solely on one effective mode. Today, we had an opportunity to learn more about how biking and transit work together in the Netherlands. Our instructor is an ex-pat from the United States, who first lived in Southern California, worked as a planner in Hawaii, and now lives in the Netherlands working for a public transit company. Bradley, our instructor for this afternoon, enlightened our group about how bicycle transport has integrated with the regional and inter-city rail services found in the country. Some of my classmates biked from Utrecht to our destination, the community of Zeist, just a bit east of Utrecht. I opted to train both ways to experience the rail service. Taking the Sprinter, which is the regional train between the cities nearby Utrecht, the train ride took only 11 minutes from our outbound...